Donald Trump unveils warship named after himself in shipbuilding push

By Jen Judson and Courtney Subramanian

  President Donald Trump announced the Navy will build a new “Trump-class” battleship as part of the White House push to modernise a fleet that’s been hobbled by years of cost overruns and delays. 

A poster displayed at the event at Trump’s gilded Mar-a-Lago estate featured an artist’s rendering of a sleek-looking warship dubbed the USS Defiant, cutting through choppy waters with a laser beam shooting from its deck and smoke billowing from a target in the background. 

 

Next to the ship was a picture of Trump raising his fist in the air in a near copy of the defiant pose he struck minutes after surviving an assassination attempt in 2024. Another poster shows a rendering of the vessel sailing by the Statue of Liberty.

 

“Some of them have gotten old and tired and obsolete, and we’re going to go the exact opposite direction,” Trump said. “The US navy will lead the design of these ships alongside me because I’m a very aesthetic person.”

 

The Navy is also pursuing a new frigate based on the Legend-class cutter as it looks to shore up a surface combatant fleet that is one-third the size the service needs, it announced Dec. 19. The ship, dubbed the FF(X), will be built by Newport News, Virginia-based HII.

 

The new ships are part of Trump’s “Golden Fleet” bid to revive US shipbuilding and address shortfalls in smaller vessels as it seeks to compete against China, where roughly 53 per cent of global shipbuilding takes place. The US builds just 0.1 per cent of the world’s ships, according to a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies assessment.  

 

The US hasn’t built a battleship since the 1940s, instead choosing to build aircraft carriers, smaller destroyers and other ships equipped with long-range missiles rather than big guns. Trump said the Navy would start with two and aim to build as many as 25.

 

Production could be a long way off. Trump’s first attempt to build a new frigate in the president’s previous term ended with a significantly delayed and over-budget program. The original plan was to build 20 of the vessels to start, but ballooning costs and production delays led to a drastic cut in the program’s ambitions.

 

Trump had already linked himself to another new weapons system, the F-47 stealth, a nod to his place as the 47th president. He’s also put his name on the newly anointed Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.

 

“What I’ve learned is that not only is the President’s idea a good one, it’s something that Navy desperately needs and now has a formal requirement for,” Navy Secretary John Phelan said at Mar-a-Lago. “The future Trump-class battleship, USS Defiant, will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.”

 

The state of US shipbuilding is vastly behind China’s production rate and the Trump administration is prioritizing investing in its shipbuilding industry to narrow the output gap. Trump created a new Office of Shipbuilding earlier this year with plans for tax incentives to attract companies to the US. 

 

The presidential announcement signifies “the Navy is trying to tap into the enthusiasm of the administration for shipbuilding and say, ‘OK, you want to build ships — let’s come up with some new ships to build because you’re going to if you have money and energy, let’s apply that toward things that the Navy needs,’” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said in an interview.

 

The Trump-class ship would replace Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which have roughly four decades of service life left and are equipped with Aegis Combat Systems that provide missile-defense capability.