President Trump announced on Monday that the United States Navy will begin building massive battleships for the first time since 1944, to join the “Golden Fleet.”

Trump announced that the new Trump-class battleships will include two ships to be built immediately, with the first named USS Defiant. He said the vessels will be 100 times more powerful than the Iowa-class battleships from WWII and will be equipped with missiles, hypersonic weapons, railguns, high-powered lasers, nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and AI technology.

“There’s never been anything like these ships,” Trump said. “These are the best in the world. They will be the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100x more powerful than any battleship ever built.”

NEW: President Trump announces that he approved a plan for the construction of two new battleships.

He says they will be larger than ever and have “100x the power” of the Iowa-class battleships.

The last battleship (USS Missouri) was built in 1944 decommissioned in 1992. pic.twitter.com/TDylUGasWK

— Kassy Akiva (@KassyAkiva) December 22, 2025

The Golden Fleet is the Navy’s “bold investment to revitalize America’s maritime industrial base,” according to the initiative’s newly launched website.

“America’s next battleship, the USS Defiant, will be part of a new class of large surface combatants with the most destructive fire power of any surface ship to ever sail — having the ability to strike an adversary at 80x the range of the previous class,” the website states. “The Trump-class Battleship will be the first-ever guided missile battleship with the ability to deploy with nuclear and hypersonic missiles.”

Photo: U.S. Navy

The USS Defiant is expected to take 2.5 years to build and is projected to measure 840 to 880 feet long, with a beam of 105 to 115 feet and a draft of 24 to 30 feet, displacing over 30,000 to 40,000 tons. The ship is designed to reach speeds greater than 30 knots and will accommodate 650 to 850 crew members.

While two ships will begin to be built immediately, Trump said the planned class size for the fleet is 20 to 25 ships.

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According to the Military Times, a Government Accountability Office report detailed two decades of poor performance at U.S. shipyards, citing low production, significant schedule delays, and issues with faulty functionality.

Trump said the new ships will be built with steel in modernized American shipyards, creating thousands of jobs, and that he will personally weigh in on the design as a “very aesthetic person.”

President Trump says he is going to help design the new U.S. Navy Battleships because he is “a very aesthetic person.” pic.twitter.com/K78rteOSMp

— Kassy Akiva (@KassyAkiva) December 22, 2025

“The US Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me because I’m a very aesthetic person alongside our partners in American industry,” Trump said. “The construction will create thousands of American jobs.”

Trump said the new fleet will be a restoration of American naval power, pointing to the great ships of the past, including President Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet to the USS Missouri, which played an important role in WWII, including hosting the Japanese surrender.

“America’s battleships have always been unmistakable symbols of national power,” Trump said. “We stopped making them for whatever reason, I don’t know.”

Trump added that 15 submarines are under construction and he plans to order more warships to join the Golden Fleet, including destroyers and a new class of aircraft carriers.

“This is American industrial power returning,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Generations of Americans will be grateful for it.”

The USS Missouri, built in 1944, was the last U.S. battleship to enter service and remained active until its decommissioning in 1992. It is now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The Golden Fleet (U.S. Navy)

Battleships were largely abandoned after WWII as aircraft came to increasingly dominate naval warfare. These slow, heavily armored ships were designed to fight other vessels, making them easy targets for air attacks — a weakness made clear at Pearl Harbor, where the USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, USS California, and USS West Virginia were sunk in 1941.

In the decades since, aircraft carriers, submarines, and missile-armed warships have replaced battleships in the U.S. Navy.

Secretary of the Navy John Phelan said the Trump-class battleships will be essential to the Navy, will have the most modern weapons systems, and serve as a flagship for commanders to oversee naval forces far out at sea.

“Not only is the president’s idea a good one, it’s something the Navy desperately needs and now has a formal requirement for,” he said. “The future Trump-class battleship the USS Defiant will be the largest, deadliest, and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.”

Specifications for the Trump-class Battleships. (U.S. Navy)

He added that the ships will give the United States a “new leg” in nuclear deterrence for the “first time in generations” because the battleships will carry the nuclear armed sea-launched cruise missile.

“We are going to make battleships great again,” Phelan said. “The USS Defiant battleship will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port.”

The battleship announcement comes as the Navy expands its fleet with a new class of smaller, agile warships. The FF(X) small surface combatant, based on the U.S. Coast Guard’s Legend-class, will be a highly-adaptable vessel, with the first ship expected to enter service in 2028.

It’s Christmas break, so it seems like an appropriate time to discuss one of my favorite books: “The Screwtape Letters,” by C.S. Lewis.

The book is all at once a deep rumination on religion, a high comedy rooted in the hilarity of both humanity’s flaws and Satan’s foibles, a tragedy about the nature of death, and a tale of redemption and everlasting life.

It is a spectacularly good book.

When you read “The Screwtape Letters,” there are a lot of truly funny moments. Lewis himself said, though, “Of all my books there was only one I did not take pleasure in writing,” calling it ‘dry and gritty going.’ “At the time, I was thinking of objections to the Christian life and decided to put them in the form ‘That’s what the devil would say.’ But making goods ‘bad’ and bads ‘good’ gets to be fatiguing.”

The book is wildly entertaining because he is obviously writing in the voice of one of Satan’s minions. In Christian theology, Satan has a will of his own, and he’s rebelling against God, which makes him a really fascinating character.

Lewis opens the book with a couple of epigraphs, one by Martin Luther: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield the texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn,” and one by Sir Thomas More: “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.”

The book is written from the perspective of Screwtape as letters to his nephew, Wormwood. Wormwood has been given the on-the-ground task of convincing a young man away from his incipient Christianity and Screwtape’s job to advise Wormwood on the best way to procure the young man’s soul.

This gives Lewis extraordinary leeway to stick and move with Satan, to make fun, to mock, to play with the entire idea. And what emerges is a great work of literature.

There are a bunch of large-scale arguments that Lewis makes in “The Screwtape Letters.” The first one is that Satan’s best weapon is the “real world.”

That is correct.

If you talk to secular people, they’ll always say that the spiritual world and God are unreal. The real world is the material world. But then, when you ask them about what’s important to them, they’ll talk about their feelings, which, of course, are inherently unreal in the same way the spiritual world is unreal.

This is a point that Lewis makes: the definition of “real” is capacious and changing on a regular basis among secularists. Lewis believes that man’s draw to the divine can be rooted in reason, and that reason actually guides you toward something beyond yourself. It guides you toward the transcendent.

That’s an idea that I heartily agree with. I believe that the notion of free will and free choice in the universe guides you toward the idea that there must be something beyond us, that there’s a logic to the universe that guides you to the question of questions: Who is the Chief Logician, who made the rules?

Credit: HarperOne

Lewis makes the same point, and then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing-in-itself.

Screwtape says,

Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it real life. Don’t let him ask what he means by real.

Thus, keep the person focused on the immediate and the now. There’s nothing that’s done this more than the internet age, where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas, and if you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society.

So what exactly does reality mean? According to Screwtape,

People ought to be taught that in all experiences which can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual elements are subjective and in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist.

The idea is that when you’re thinking about death, the only thing that is real is the death itself. You’re not supposed to look at the spiritual element of death. Or, if you do look at something that makes you very happy, you’re not supposed to look at the spiritual element of what makes you very happy. Instead, focus on the pure materialism of the thing. The goal is to enmesh mankind in the world.

Screwtape says,

How disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death with which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless in wartime. Not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.

The material world, then, is the chief ally of Screwtape because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction. God has obligations. God has duties. 

Screwtape says,

Human beings hate every idea that suggests Him just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a passbook. (meaning a checkbook.)

The idea is that if you’re not thinking about duty, and then you’re forced to think about duty, you don’t like it very much.

The other thing that Screwtape tries to get you to focus on is the future — at all times. If you can focus on the future at all times, then people will be very neglectful of the present.

So says Screwtape,

It’s far better to make them live in the Future. … The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought like Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence, nearly all vices are rooted in the future.

The idea is, if you’re thinking about the future, then you’re not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now. You’re thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now, and that allows you to do bad things in the name of a “better future.”

Screwtape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God. So on the one hand, you try to get people sunk in reality, and this drives them away from God.

On the other hand, Screwtape advises Wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly; if you can be narcissistic, checking yourself all the time, you’re going to end up without God.

Lewis teaches that very often in life, we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm, and then the enthusiasm wears away. This happens all the time with a variety of tasks, and once that happens, that is when you encourage people to look into being morose, look into being depressed, to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty, to stop trying to take joy in the spiritual aspect of what they’re doing, and instead focus on the fact that it’s just sheer drudgery.

Screwtape says that the rule of thumb for seducing mankind away from God is to encourage people to be unselfconscious when considering sin — to be unabashed, unashamed, blasé about your sin, but to be self-conscious and awkward when you consider acts of faith.

This is modern society in a nutshell. The more you sin, the prouder you should be. You should engage in festivals celebrating your sin. When it comes to going to church, you should be shy: “I don’t want to be judgmental; I’ll make you feel ashamed. But when it comes to my sin, man, I will tell you about my sins all day long because we can all be comfortable; we can be the boys when we’re talking about our sins.”

Screwtape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of Mankind, writ large. This, obviously, is the project of the Left, which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a “better world” for everybody else.

The book has wonderful pieces of advice, even for people who are not totally religious, about how to act better in your inner world, how to treat other people better, and how to have better relations with your spouse.

It’s a beautifully written book.

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