President unveils new fleet of 'Trump-class' warships

2025-12-23 07:57:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

President Donald Trump unveiled the Navy's "Trump" class of warships on Monday, describing them as a superior warship to replace an old, tired and outdated American fleet.

"They will help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry, and inspire fear in America's enemies around the world," Trump said, unveiling the new category of ships from the library at Mar-a-Lago.

Accompanied by images of “Trump-class” warships at sea, Trump said he would take an active role in designing them. The president made the announcement Monday afternoon in Florida with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also a national security adviser. He did not use the term “Trump-class” in his comments.

The “Trump-class” ships will be part of a new “Golden Fleet” that the president has ordered for the Navy, which aims to better counter China and other adversaries and adhere more closely to Trump’s aesthetic standards. “The U.S. Navy will lead the design of these ships with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.

Equipped with "the highest-level weapons and missiles," hypersonic weapons, railguns, cruise missiles and "the most sophisticated lasers in the world," the new warships will be the largest ever built, Trump said.

Each of them will weigh between 30,000 and 40,000 tons, he said, and will be built in the United States. "They will be very well controlled by artificial intelligence," he said without elaborating.

"We anticipate that these ships will be the first of an entirely new class of ships that will be produced in the coming years," he said. Initially, the Navy will build two of the "Trump-class" ships, quickly followed by eight more. Trump said he envisioned 20 to 25 such ships, which he said would become "the flagship of the American naval fleet."

He also said he would work to update US aircraft carriers as part of the "Golden Fleet" update for the US Navy.

Trump had previously complained about the appearance of some American ships.

"I'm not a fan of some of the ships you're building. I'm a very aesthetic person and I don't like some of the ships you're building aesthetically," Trump told a group of service members gathered at Quantico earlier this year./ CNA