“Trump-Class” Ships: Trump Slaps His Name on a New Navy Fleet Pitch

With input from Axios, CNN, and NPR.

President Donald Trump says the US is moving closer to building what his administration is branding as “the Golden Fleet” — starting with a new set of military vessels he’s calling “Trump-class” warships.

Trump rolled out the idea Monday from Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Navy Secretary John Phelan. The president framed the ships like modern-day battleships — bigger, faster, and “100 times more powerful” than anything that’s come before, in his telling.

Concept art released alongside the announcement looks more like a sleek cruiser than an old-school WWII battleship. It shows a massive gray ship with missile-launch capability, at least one laser-style weapon, and a helicopter hovering overhead. And yes — the artwork reportedly includes an image of Trump raising his fist emblazoned on the back, because subtlety is not the theme here.

The pitch lands in the middle of a Navy shipbuilding system that’s already struggling to deliver what it’s currently building. Even Trump acknowledged the basic problem: the US makes top-tier hardware, but it doesn’t crank it out fast enough.

That’s the awkward backdrop for launching a brand-new, mega-ambitious ship class — especially when major programs are already running late and over budget. Watchdogs like the Government Accountability Office have described the shipbuilding industrial base as stuck in a “perpetual state of triage,” with delays and cost overruns piling up.

Trump’s naming choice is also a sharp break from tradition, putting his personal stamp on a weapons platform the way fighter jets sometimes get flashy designations. It’s the latest example of how seapower has become a personal fixation of Trump’s second term: he’s complained about ships looking rusty, set up a shipbuilding office with a “fast, very soon” promise, and generally treated naval muscle as a billboard for national strength.

The big question now is whether this is a real build plan with timelines, contracts and industrial capacity behind it — or another headline-grabbing concept that runs into the hard wall of workforce shortages, shipyard limits and budget math once the cameras move on.