WASHINGTON, 23 Dec. - (ANA) - The US will commission a new “Golden Fleet” of heavily armed Navy ‘battleships’ named after Donald Trump.

 

The president announced that the laser-armed vessels would be the “largest battleships in the history of the world” to maintain his country’s military supremacy.

 

He said construction on the Trump Class USS Defiant – the first US warship to be named after a sitting president – would begin soon, and it was expected to be operational within two and a half years.

 

Mr Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Florida: “Each one of these will be the largest battleship in the history of our country, the largest battleship in the history of the world ever built.”

 

Speaking alongside images of the ships, he described them as “100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built” and said: “They’ll help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American ship-building industry and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world.”

 

Mr Trump said the new laser-armed battleships would be built with the help of robots and AI, but also create employment: “We’re going to be employing a lot of artificial things but the beauty is we’re going to have more jobs than we’ve ever had.”

 

The 30,000 to 40,000-tonne battleships will be made from steel and armed with missiles, guns, hypersonic weapons and high powered lasers, the US president said.

 

They will also carry new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missiles that are currently under development and, he said, had been proven to be “extremely lethal”.

 

Mr Trump said he would assist the US Navy in designing the ships because he was a “very aesthetic person”, and that Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who attended the press conference, would be involved.

 

However, Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and current senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, said the ships were not suitable for confronting China.

 

He told the New York Times the navy needed a dispersed fleet of minimally manned ships with large weapons magazines. “These ‘battleships’ will achieve none of these tactical goals,” he said.

 

Mr Trump also said the government plans to keep oil recovered from seized Venezuelan oil tankers. US authorities have boarded two tankers this month and are in “active pursuit” of a third ship as America ramps up pressure on Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s president to relinquish power.

 

The Trump administration has accused Venezuela of using oil money to fund drug-related crime, while Caracas has described the tanker seizures as “piracy”. Asked what they plan to do with the oil, Mr Trump said: “We’ll keep it, maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserves, we’re keeping it, we’re keeping the ships also.”

 

The Golden Fleet announcement comes a month after the US Navy scrapped its plans to build a new small warship, citing growing delays and cost overruns. It instead decided on an upgraded version of an existing Coast Guard cutter.

 

Historically, the term battleship has referred to a very specific type of ship – a large, heavily armoured vessel armed with massive guns designed to bombard other ships or targets ashore.

 

Battleships were at the height of prominence during the Second World War, and the largest of the US battleships, the Iowa Class, were roughly 60,000 tons. Since the war, modern fleets have favoured aircraft carriers and long-range missiles.

 

The US Navy did modernise four Iowa-class battleships in the 1980s by adding cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles, along with modern radars, but by the 1990s all four had been decommissioned.

 

Mr Trump has long held strong opinions on specific aspects of the Navy’s fleet, sometimes with a view to keeping older technology instead of modernising.

 

During his first term, he unsuccessfully called for the return to steam-powered catapults to launch jets from the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers instead of the more modern electromagnetic system.

 

He has also complained to John Phelan, the Secretary of the Navy, about the look of its destroyers and decried ships being covered in rust.

 

Mr Phelan told senators at his confirmation hearing that Trump “has texted me numerous times very late at night, sometimes after one [o’clock] in the morning” about “rusty ships or ships in a yard, asking me what am I doing about it”.   - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/23 December 2025 - - -