Trump announces new class of warship named after himself

PALM BEACH, Florida – US President Donald Trump announced that the US Navy will build a new “Trump-class” battleship, as part of a White House push to modernise a fleet that has been hobbled by years of cost overruns and delays.

A poster displayed at the event at Mr 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 the US leader 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 are going to go the exact opposite direction,” Mr Trump said. “The US Navy will lead the design of these ships alongside me because I am a very aesthetic person.”

The navy is also pursuing a new frigate based off 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 on Dec 19.

The ship, dubbed the FF(X), will be built by Newport News-based HII.

The new ships are part of Mr 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 has not 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.

Mr Trump said the navy would start with two and aim to build as many as 25.

Production, however, could be a long way off.

Mr Trump’s first attempt to build a new frigate during his previous term ended with a significantly delayed and over-budget programme.

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 programme’s ambitions.

Mr Trump had already linked himself to another new weapons system, including the F-47 stealth, a nod to his place as the 47th president.

He has 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 have learnt is that not only is the President’s idea a good one, (but) it is (also) something that (the) 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 prioritising investing in its shipbuilding industry to narrow the output gap.

Earlier in 2025, Mr Trump created a new office of shipbuilding 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, ‘Okay, you want to build ships – let’s come up with some new ships to build because you are going to if you have money and energy, let’s apply that towards things that the navy needs’”, said Mr Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

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 defence capability. BLOOMBERG