The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships. As Lara Seligman and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal note, Trump has complained for years that America’s warships are “terrible-looking,” and has been involved in the design of the new “Golden Fleet.” A former rear admiral who is director at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies told Seligman and Weisgerber that the Golden Fleet is “exactly what we don’t need.” The last battleship in history to be built was the HMS Vanguard, completed in 1946; the last battleship commissioned by the U.S. was the USS Missouri, which was decommissioned in the 1990s. The proposed ships are, he said, “focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

In an illustration of the new battleship provided by the White House, the vessel sports an image of Trump on its upper deck.

Trump seems to be focusing on creating a golden legacy for himself as the MAGA movement falters.

At a news conference today from Mar-a-Lago announcing the new Trump-class ships, Trump expressed concern that Americans were still talking about the Epstein files. “A lot of people are very angry that pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein. But they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party, and you ruined a reputation of somebody,” Trump said. “A lot of people are very angry that this continues. A lot of Republicans,” he added.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Justice Department to release all the files by Friday, but it has released only about 10,000 of what are apparently hundreds of thousands of documents, and those are heavily redacted. Department leaders are quite obviously covering up material, suggesting that what remains unknown is so hideous that Trump and his loyalists have concluded it’s better to break the law Congress passed to provide transparency, thus infuriating the MAGA base that voted for Trump because he lied that he would release the files, than to let anyone know what they’re hiding.

Former president Bill Clinton issued a statement today demanding that the Department of Justice follow the law and “produce the full and complete record the public demands and deserves.” The material the department has released implies that a major perpetrator of abuse in the files is Clinton. Today he noted that the department’s actions make it clear that “someone or something is being protected.” Clinton says he needs “no such protection” and calls “on President Trump to direct Attorney General Bondi to immediately release any remaining materials referring to, mentioning, or containing a photograph of Bill Clinton.”

In other words, as USA Today opinion columnist Michael J. Stern put it: “Bill Clinton just called Trump & Pam Bondi’s bluff.”

MAGA leaders are now openly fighting over its future. At this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Erika Kirk, the widow of the late Charlie Kirk, announced her support for Vice President J.D. Vance for president in 2028, although Trump has been handing out Trump 2028 hats. As recently as last week, Brian Schwartz of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has been talking with lawyer Alan Dershowitz about ways in which he could constitutionally serve a third term. (He cannot.)

As Andrew Howard of Politico reported, the conference featured infighting in which prominent podcaster Ben Shapiro called out right-wing influencers Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon, who have lately moved even further toward the Nazi far right as “frauds and grifters.” Meanwhile, prominent employees are leaving the Heritage Foundation after its right-wing leader, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson’s friendly interview with far-right Groyper leader Nick Fuentes. Many of those leaving Heritage are moving to former vice president Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom foundation, established in 2021 after Trump supporters called for Pence’s hanging. Pence’s shop rejects the trade walls, isolationism, and strongman rule of Trumpism.

That split is showing elsewhere. Ewan Palmer of The Daily Beast reported today that Texas senator and podcaster Ted Cruz is bad-mouthing Vance as he considers a 2028 presidential run, and notably, the state senators in Pence’s home state of Indiana recently rejected Trump’s demands that they redistrict the state in Trump’s favor.

And there is strong pushback to what appears to be last night’s attempt to censor the press.

On Sunday the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, pulled a 60 Minutes story about the Trump administration’s renditions of migrants to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador just hours before it was scheduled to air. The 60 Minutes story had undergone the normal process of vetting, fact-checking, and legal reviews. In an email to the newsroom, Weiss said she pulled the story, which focused on the torture the prisoners endured, because it did not present the administration’s justification for sending 252 migrants to CECOT.

Weiss took over the top editorship of CBS News in October after Paramount Skydance, owned by Trump loyalist David Ellison, bought her opinion website Free Press for $150 million. Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is currently in the midst of attempting a hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. Yesterday, billionaire Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father, personally guaranteed that he would stand behind more than $40 billion in financing required for the deal.

The 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, wrote in an email to her colleagues: “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now—after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Alfonsi also noted that the journalists had repeatedly asked for interviews with administration officials, who did not answer. “Government silence is a statement,” she wrote, “not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”

But it turned out that the segment had already been distributed in Canada, and copies of it appeared in the U.S. this afternoon. Legal analyst Asha Rangappa watched it and explained that it “debunks the fundamental claim used by [the] Trump admin[istration] that the detainees it sent there are ‘terrorists’ and corroborates torture using clips from El Salvadorean influencers Bukele uses internally. Would be a shock to low information voters, probably.” Journalist Parker Molloy, who covers the media and culture, observed: “People are going to get to see a totally normal news piece that clearly isn’t biased against Trump and think, ‘She was afraid that THIS would upset the administration??’”

Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote commented: “Had Bari Weiss just ran the story, it would have been seen by a couple million people tops. The bootleg has now gone viral, and may end up being the most-watched 60 Minutes segment ever.”

In a new YouGov poll conducted for The Economist, fewer than half of Republicans say they “strongly approve” of Trump, and only a third of Republicans approve strongly of his handling of inflation and prices.

All of this adds up to a president who thinks a lot about gold and his legacy. On Friday, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo observed that, these days, the political world around Trump “has a feeling of drift, spectacle and fragmentation. Trump’s ballroom epitomizes it—crass, stupid, vulgar, unacceptable and yet ultimately meaningless. It’s the full-size version of having his stacked Kennedy Center board, of which he is the chairman, rename the institution after him…. These all have the feeling of a man who is bored, tapped out, losing coherence and energy and who others are trying to keep distracted.”

Toria Sheffield of People magazine reports that at this weekend’s Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters told the audience that the ballroom President Donald J. Trump wants to build next to the White House is “four times the size of the White House.” According to Watters, Trump told him: “Jesse, it’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.”

Quote:

This afternoon, President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will build two new “Trump-class” battleships.

Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.

That’s pretty much what the president did today when he announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the “Golden Fleet,” his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)

Trump’s press conference today was among his more haywire performances, and his slushy delivery and meandering answers will not halt speculation about his cognitive health. When asked for his endgame in the confrontation with Venezuela, for example, he launched into his usual lines about people being sent into the United States from prisons and mental hospitals, as if someone had hit the wrong button and played the wrong recording. He also reiterated that he wanted U.S. ships to be more attractive, noting that he would be involved in the design of the new vessels because “I am a very aesthetic person.”

(Apparently, no one has ever explained to him that sharp design does not equal military value. The B-52 bomber, the mainstay of the U.S. bomber force for decades, was affectionately called the BUFF by its crews. Big, ugly, fat … the rest you can figure out.)

Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan did make some news today. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth were also on hand, but they limited themselves to some standard-issue sycophancy.) First, we learned that the president of the United States clearly has no idea what battleships are. Second, the United States is going to invest in a new class of naval vessel. Third, America is going to reverse more than 30 years of wise policy by putting nuclear weapons back on U.S. Navy surface vessels.

Trump announced that the new Trump-class ships will be “battleships,” but they seem to be supersize versions of the existing workhorse of the Navy, the Arleigh Burke–class destroyers; the first ship, called the Defiant, will be about three times the size of a Burke. The Navy has also announced the development of a new class of frigates. Destroyers and frigates, as the Navy knows (and as the commander in chief should know) are not battleships. Battleships are huge and powerful, and are meant to dish out —and withstand—serious punishment. Destroyers and frigates are less rugged, and perform missions that require more speed and agility than battleships can muster. But none of that matters: The goal, apparently, was to give a childlike president a new toy, named after himself, in exchange for gobs of money that the Navy will figure out how to spend later.

Indeed, defense investors cheered the announcement, but the spending will likely come much later, because the United States does not have the capacity to build vessels it hasn’t even designed yet. Trump told a reporter today that he expects the first ship to arrive in two and a half years, which is possible if the Navy slaps some gold paint on a Burke class, adds some missiles, and then stencils USS TRUMP on the side. But the last time the Navy really tried to create a new kind of ship—the Zumwalt-class destroyer—the process took years and ended in failure.

The biggest news came today when Phelan said that the new Trump class will carry nuclear weapons. Why? Perhaps Phelan, who has no experience in, or with, the Navy, figured that Trump would want the new ships to have the biggest and best of everything. (Phelan did promise today that they would be the “best-looking” warships in the world.) But like everything else about this chaotic scheme, putting nuclear arms on destroyers or cruisers or “battleships” makes no sense in the 21st century—if it ever did.

During the Cold War, U.S. surface vessels carried all kinds of nuclear munitions for use against other ships, submarines, and land targets, because such was the logic of the Soviet-American standoff: World War III would be a final confrontation of two immense military forces, including nuclear duels at sea. In 1991, with the Soviet Union on its last legs, President George H. W. Bush ordered the removal of all such weapons from the surface fleet. Many Navy officers were relieved: I know from speaking with several at the time that they regarded nuclear weapons on their ships as a useless burden.

Today’s Navy is not going to get into a nuclear showdown with the Soviet fleet. Nor, for that matter, is it likely to trade mushroom clouds at sea with the Chinese or Russian fleets. Carrying nuclear weapons on surface vessels—big, slow, exposed platforms—is not only strategically pointless but also a needless risk. George H. W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, both defense hawks, knew this more than three decades ago.

As with all Trump vanity projects, no one seems to be asking what national purpose is served by these new plans. Does the Navy need new ships? What should it do with them if it gets them? Do they really need to be armed with nuclear weapons? The answer from the Trump administration, clearly, is: Who cares? As retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery told The Wall Street Journal, the Golden Fleet plan is “exactly what we don’t need”—but, he added, no one is focused on America’s maritime needs, because “they are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

Phelan might not know much about the Navy, but he knows Trump: He promised that the new Trump-class ships will inspire “awe and reverence” in any port they visit. But strategy is more than just giving lethal playthings to a president who has a simplistic understanding of ships. It is the art of making choices, an attempt to match means with ends. In a rational world, this would be the thinking driving the acquisition of weapons.

I taught military officers for more than two decades at the Naval War College. One thing I learned from conversations with my students was that the Navy really needs to invest more in its officers and sailors, and reduce the tempo of operations that are burning them out. The best ships in the world won’t mean much if their crews are fatigued and poorly trained. As the defense analyst John Ferrari recently wrote, for years, the Navy has been “structurally compromised” because its people are exhausted, its ships are “aging faster than they could be repaired,” and the fleet’s readiness is declining. These are serious problems that require serious work, but Trump has found a way around all of this irritating chatter by sticking his name on a new ship and telling the military to go build it.

At Mar-a-Lago today, Trump reiterated his demand that Greenland must become part of the United States. His plan for a fleet of Trump-branded battleships is only slightly more likely to happen than a victory parade in Nuuk—and neither is in the national interest of the United States.

Well I've seen the CECOT story Bari Weiss pulled from 60 Minutes. Talk about the Streisand Effect.