Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
President Donald Trump announced plans Thursday for a new class of warships he’s calling “battleships,” that appear to be based on a design by a five-year-old trying to draw a cybertruck. The vessels, to be named the Trump class, will reportedly carry every weapon system currently under development, several that aren’t, and at least one that the Navy specifically stopped developing because it violates the Geneva Convention.
Guns & Missiles & Lasers, Oh My! (Navy.mil)
Trump revealed the USS Defiant design at Mar-a-Lago, flanked by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, all of whom maintained expressions suggesting they’d just been shown blueprints drawn in crayon. The ships will displace between 30,000 and 40,000 tons, Trump said, making them roughly three times the size of current destroyers, a ratio he determined using the same measurement system he applies to crowd sizes and his own actual height of 5’9″.
“From Theodore Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet to the legendary USS Missouri, America’s battleships have always been unmistakable symbols of national power,” Trump said, gesturing to a rendering that appeared to have been designed by someone who’d seen exactly one picture of a Star Destroyer. The Trump class “will be the flagships of the American naval fleet, and there has never been anything built like them,” which is technically accurate in the way that nothing has been built like the Cybertruck either, and for similar reasons involving geometry and seaworthiness.
When asked about the design’s radar cross-section, essentially how visible it would be to enemy sensors, Pentagon officials said the ships would be “very easy to see, possibly from space,” though they emphasized this as a feature rather than a flaw. The vessels will reportedly include three large Vertical Launch System arrays, multiple 5-inch guns, electromagnetic railguns, laser weapons, and a new nuclear-armed cruise missile, creating what one defense analyst called “a floating Christmas tree of things we’re not sure work yet.”
It's yet unclear whether or not there will be a McDonald's on board. But probably. (Navy.mil)
Trump said the ships will also serve as command platforms overseeing crewed and uncrewed vessels, featuring “artificial intelligence-driven capabilities” that remain unspecified but which he assured would be “the best AI, incredible AI.” When pressed for details, Phelan explained that the AI would help “coordinate complex operations,” then trailed off while staring at the rendering’s impossible angles.
The first two ships are expected to cost an amount the Navy hasn’t calculated yet, to be built in shipyards that haven’t been selected yet, using technologies that haven’t been finalized yet.
“We’re going to make battle groups great again,” Phelan said, which implies battle groups were previously great, then stopped being great, then will become great again through ships that don’t yet exist. He added that the USS Defiant would “inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port,” assuming it fits in any port built before Trump took an interest in naval architecture.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
