Washington: President Donald Trump on Monday said he will oversee the development of a new class of Navy battleship - named after himself.
The move was cast in part as an effort to give the nation’s stagnant shipbuilding industry a shot in the arm, but also will upend the Navy’s ship-naming norms and thrust presidential politics firmly into the programme from its genesis.
The announcement follows a flurry of recent actions by Trump to rebrand existing institutions to include his name, including the US Institute of Peace and the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts.
Trump, speaking alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, said the new warships will have “guns and missiles at the highest level,” along with hypersonic weapons, electric rail guns and lasers.
The first battleship, to be called the USS Defiant, will be part of a broader effort to build a modern “Golden Fleet” of warships, Trump said, indicating that he will play a leading role in the programme.
“The US Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I’m a really aesthetic person,” Trump said.
The Navy said in a news release after Trump’s announcement that the vessel “will be the most lethal surface combatant ever constructed” and triple the size of a current Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, which is about 505 feet long and weighs about 9,000 tonnes.
A logo unveiled for the new ship class depicts Trump in the moments after a July 2024 assassination attempt, fist held high.
The Trump-class naming, would defy the Navy’s long-standing - if unevenly applied - traditions of naming aircraft carriers after presidents and battleships after states. Almost all of the service’s current carriers are named after former commanders in chief, including the USS Gerald R Ford, the lead ship in a class of aircraft carrier that is expected to include other ships named after President John F Kennedy, President Bill Clinton and President George W Bush. Typically, a class of warship shares its name with the first vessel in that class.
The Navy relied heavily on battleships during World War II but they were eventually deemed obsolete and decommissioned.
The last one to see active service was the USS Missouri, which was decommissioned in 1992 and turned into a museum in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor.
Phelan said the battleship would become part of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, carrying nuclear cruise missiles. The weapon was approved by Trump during his first term, cancelled by the Biden administration and then revived by Congress in 2024.
