President Donald Trump is promoting a new “Trump-class” battleship as the centerpiece of a promised “Golden Fleet,” telling supporters he wants 20 to 25 giant warships to anchor what he calls a rebuilt Navy. In videos and social posts, he has talked about a first ship named USS Defiant, hypersonic missiles, nuclear weapons, and a $1.5 trillion “Dream Military” budget, turning the concept into a political showpiece as much as a military proposal.Golden Fleet Yet Navy planners and outside experts say the plan clashes with modern naval warfare, which relies on many smaller, harder-to-find ships instead of a few giant targets. They warn that Trump’s battleship vision would be hugely expensive, slow to build, and out of step with the threats the United States faces at sea today.
Trump’s own clips and friendly coverage underscore the gap between sweeping promises and thin details. One short video shows him saying “we envision that these ships will be the first of a whole new class of battleships,” while another online reel claims construction of two Trump-class USS Defiant ships will start “soon” and finish in about two and a half years. A separate teaser post describes a single USS Defiant that would be longer than World War II battleships and armed with lasers and hypersonic missiles. Even these mixed stories about whether there is one Defiant or two point to a larger issue: this “class” exists more in campaign-style messaging than in formal Navy plans.
The dream: Golden Fleet vs modern doctrine
Trump often casts the Trump-class as the centerpiece of a grand rebuilding of American power at sea, tied to a huge “Dream Military” budget and his promise of “big, beautiful battleships.” In one social media pitch, he says the Navy has been “hobbled by years of cost overruns and delays” and that his Golden Fleet will fix that by putting 20 to 25 massive ships at the core of U.S. sea power.Skeptical analysts note that these claims are heavy on slogans and light on design drawings, shipyard contracts, or timelines that match how long large warships actually take to build.
Online supporters echo Trump’s language, calling the Trump-class the “largest and most powerful” warship ever built and tying it to a broader push for rail guns, lasers, and hypersonic weapons. Even sympathetic coverage, however, concedes that the project faces a “large obstacle” in the form of current Navy thinking and budgets, which already struggle to keep up with maintenance and new technology. The Golden Fleet idea asks Congress and the Pentagon to bet hundreds of billions of dollars on a few very visible symbols of strength, even as many military planners argue that the future lies in spreading firepower across more, smaller platforms.
Reality: doctrine, vulnerability and cost
For decades, Navy strategy has shifted away from giant surface ships and toward a more distributed fleet of carriers, destroyers, submarines, and aircraft. The goal is to make U.S. forces harder to find and hit in an age of cheap drones and long-range precision missiles. In this world, a 40,000-ton Trump-class ship “bristling with big guns and retrofitted armor,” as one online debate puts it, may look impressive but would also be easy for enemy missiles and submarines to track.
History also cuts against Trump’s plan. A detailed review of past notes that no new U.S. battleship has been built since the USS Missouri in 1944 and that large surface ships became increasingly vulnerable once air power and guided weapons matured. In tight seas such as the Baltic, critics ask whether a Trump-class hull could even survive a modern Swedish submarine. On top of that, the Congressional Research Service has warned that each ship could cost up to $15 billion, and one Connecticut-based report says such spending would squeeze out submarines and other programs that many experts see as more urgent.
Nukes, jobs and a Navy that has moved on
Trump has tried to answer doubts by tying the Trump-class to nuclear firepower and blue-collar work. According to one policy report, he wants the Trump-class to carry nuclear weapons, reviving types of arms that have not been on surface ships since the Cold War, while also promising new jobs at shipyards and suppliers. Moving nuclear weapons back onto surface ships would mark a sharp break from decades of practice that kept these weapons on submarines and other more hidden platforms, and it would turn every Trump-class hull into a prime target for enemies and for domestic protest.
Many defense experts doubt the project will move beyond talk. A Los Angeles–based analysis quotes Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies calling the battleship idea a “budget-busting folly” that will “probably never sail,” arguing that political and fiscal limits will bite long before any Trump-class ship reaches the fleet.Critics also warn that pouring money into a few huge ships would weaken U.S. security by starving the distributed forces the Navy needs to deter China and Russia.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
