President Donald Trump announced the US Navy will build a new “Trump-class” warship as part of the White House push to modernize the service’s surface fleet and restore domestic shipbuilding.
A poster displayed at the event at 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 Trump 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
“We’re desperately in need of ships,” Trump said. “Some of them have gotten old and tired and obsolete, and we’re going to go the exact opposite direction.”
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, the service announced Dec. 19. The ship, dubbed the FF(X), will be built by Newport News, Virginia-based HII, whose Legend-class cutter will serve as the basis for the new vessel.
The new ships are part of Trump’s “Golden Fleet” bid to revive US shipbuilding and address shortfalls in smaller ships exposed by recent military operations around the world. Overhauling shipping has been one of the top defense-related priorities, with Secretary of State Pete Hegseth saying contractors need to speed up development of new weapons systems or lose government contracts.
Trump had already linked himself to another new weapons system, the F-47 stealth, a nod to his place as the 47th president. He’s 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.
The state of US shipbuilding is vastly behind China’s production rate and the Trump administration is prioritizing investing in its shipbuilding industry to narrow the output gap. Trump created a new Office of Shipbuilding earlier this year with plans for tax incentives to attract companies to the US.
The Oval Office announcement signifies “the Navy is trying to tap into the enthusiasm of the administration for shipbuilding and say, ‘OK, you want to build ships, — let’s come up with some new ships to build because you’re going to if you have money and energy, let’s apply that toward things that the Navy needs,’” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said in an interview.
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The cruiser 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 defense capability.
The Trump administration’s first attempt to build a new frigate in the president’s previous term ended with a significantly delayed and over-budget program. The original plan was to build 20 of the vessels to start, using a foreign design from Trieste, Italy-based Fincantieri SpA, whose Wisconsin-based subsidiary had been contracted to build the frigates. In order to adapt the design to meet US military standards, the ship’s cost ballooned and the increased complexity led to production delays.
