The White House ballroom. The Triumphal Arch. The relined Reflecting Pool. The new 747.
Together, they cost a small fraction of just one of the “Golden Fleet” of battleships that President Trump has ordered in a multibillion-dollar scandal that gets less notice than the gilded cherubs in the Oval Office. Their name: The Trump Class.
The first Trump-Class battleship is expected to cost $17.5 billion, with the next two coming in at $14.5 billion each, a total of $36.5 billion for three. A Naval warship expert describes them as hugely expensive, easily targeted behemoths that drain funding for small, more effective alternatives that the U.S. Navy actually needs.
But Trump likes them. And he wants more.
“So now we’re building 10 of them, initial order, 10,” he said when he announced his plans for the Golden Fleet at a media event at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Dec. 22 last year. That number would take the check to about $150 billion.
At 35,000 tons, the Trump-class battleships will be considerably lighter than such iconic World War II counterparts as the USS Iowa, which is decommissioned and now serves as a 60,000-ton floating museum. The crew is also smaller, with around 800 for the Trump class, compared to in excess of 1,800 for the Iowa.
But at 880 feet, the Trump-class will nearly match the Iowa’s 887 feet. The Golden Fleet, which Trump says he had a hand in designing, appears to grow less out of actual military necessity than from his fascination with big battleships dating back to a World War II docuseries he watched as a child.
“Has anyone seen Victory at Sea?” he asked the press.
The 26-episode docuseries chronicling America’s naval warfare with Nazi Germany and Japan first aired in 1952, when Trump was 8 years old.
“You ever hear of battleships, you know, World War II?” he said. “You saw those big ships, the Iowa, the Alabama, the Missouri…sailing through that water like it’s nothing. Those big waves are crashing under the front.”
He continued. “The hulls are made of seven inches of steel, not aluminum…. And it’s going through those waves like it’s a hot knife through butter, right? And it was incredible, it was a great thing, it was an act of beauty.”
But Trump apparently missed the Victory at Sea’s ultimate message regarding armaments; battleships were supplanted by aircraft carriers as the pre-eminent victors at sea. He may not have been aware that even the seven-inch steel armor was no match for modern missiles, a primary reason the behemoths were pulled from service, the last being the USS Missouri in 1992.
“The new battleship that we have, which I’ve seen and helped design, I put a little more spirit in the hull, a little bit more, give me a little bit more hull, I want that ship to look gorgeous, you know.”
As with everything else with Trump, appearance was a paramount concern.
“Forget about stealth,” he said. “They design ugly equipment for stealth. Well, we’re designing great-looking equipment, also stealth.”
Trump added that he had suggested the Navy bring back the WWII-era battleships and was told his new ships will be “100 times more powerful.”
“Think of that, 100 times more powerful,” Trump told the press at Mar-a-Lago.
A naval warship expert told the Daily Beast that Trump-class battleships as designed have so many add-ons that they have only marginally greater missile launch capacity than a current U.S. Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruiser that is one-third the size.
“The result is a ship that uses enormous displacement for negligible gains in missile firepower,“ Dr. Emma Salisbury, a Britain-based naval warship expert who is Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program and an Associate Fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre told the Daily Beast.
There are supposed to be more weapons systems that are still in prolonged development: high-energy lasers and a railgun that uses electricity and magnetic forces instead of gunpowder to propel projectiles at super-high speeds. The battleship is also designed to be a command and communications center. It will be a launch pad for both helicopters and vertical take-off aircraft.
But Salisbury warns that all these apparent strengths may prove to be a weakness.
“It seems to be trying to do a bit of everything, and the problem with things that do everything is that they do none of them well,” she told the Daily Beast. “And aside from all the specific issues with the battleship itself, if you have a massive platform that is supposed to be doing all of these different mission sets, I worry that it would do none of them well, and therefore be a liability in battle, because it is such a big target.”
One guiding principle in the ship’s design appears to be a Trumpian more, more, more.
“It seems to me like, ‘Oh, let’s get a railgun. Let’s put that on. Let’s get missiles,’” Salisbury said. “I’m just surprised he didn’t add a ballroom and a golf course.”
Salisbury has published a critique titled “The Trump-Class Battleship: Spectacle Wins out over Combat Power” followed by “The Golden Fleet on Paper: Ambition Meets Strategic Contradiction.” Her opinion can be summed up with a single sentence.
“It’s completely insane,” she told the Daily Beast.
She added, “All the naval experts I know agree, apart from (inevitably) those with roles in the administration.”
Salisbury noted that spending billions on battleships will drain funds that could be put to better military use.
“Every dollar you spend on this, you’re not spending on everything else the Navy needs,” she said.
She said the Navy requires multiple smaller ships such as the $4.4 billion DDGX guided missile destroyer to confront such challenges as Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. But that project was abandoned shortly before Trump unveiled plans for his Golden Fleet.
“[The DDGX] has been canceled in favor of doing the battleship instead, which makes it even more nuts,” Salisbury said.
The Navy insists that the Trump-class battleships are vital.
“The Fleet of the Future requires a large surface combatant capable of anchoring the Main Battle Force and serving as a command and control node for distributed operations of manned combatants and a scalable array of unmanned platforms,” a Navy official told the Daily Beast. “The nuclear-powered battleship will direct the fight and employ the next generation of game-changing naval weapons to dominate the maritime domain.”
The Daily Beast asked Salisbury for a response to the Navy official’s position.
“The Navy comment is interesting,” she said. “What they’re describing there is an aircraft carrier! Carriers already act as command nodes in their strike groups (which contain destroyers etc for weapons) and work is apace in other nations (including the UK) to be able to launch drones off them.”
The Navy’s current plan is to build the new Trump-class Golden Fleet in Newport News, Virginia. America’s first battleship, the USS Virginia, was built there in 1906, when the Navy sought weapons platforms that could fire huge shells at considerable distances and survive big shells fired at it.
Some $1 billion has been allocated for “advance procurement” of the new class of battleships self-named by a president who seems to reside in the past even as he speaks of the future. Construction is slated to begin in late August 2028. It is expected to be completed in August 2036.
The name of the particular $17.5 billion battleship being greenlit in defiance of reason was on the poster illustrations displayed for the media at the Mar-a-Lago announcement in December: “USS Defiant.”
