President Donald Trump announced plans for the construction of a new line of battleships for the United States Navy on Monday, which the president claims will be “one hundred times more powerful” than any warship ever built.
The president, who is spending the Christmas holidays at his private club in South Florida, made the announcement alongside Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan.
“Each one of these will be the largest battleship in the history of our country, the largest battleship in the history of the world ever built,” Trump stated at Mar-a-Lago. “They’ll help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry, and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world. We want respect. We’re going to have it.”
The president said Monday that construction on two of the new battleships will begin almost “immediately,” with hopes to soon build up to “20 to 25.”
“Once completed, these new 30 to 40,000 ton plus vessels will be the flagships of the American naval fleet. There has never been anything built like them,” he continued, adding that each will be outfitted with a full complement of nuclear and non-nuclear missiles, guns, “and even the high-powered lasers that you’ve been starting to read about.”
Though the president did not specifically mention it in his remarks, the new line of battleships will be known as “Trump-class,” according to signage displayed by the White House at Trump’s announcement.
Hegseth said that Monday’s announcement “marks a general commitment to American sea power across the entire department.”
“Sea power, that always has to be decisive, has been in the history of America and will continue to be under the leadership of President Trump,” he continued. “This new class, these new investments, will be the types of things that for decades, for centuries, the American people will look back and thank President Trump for having the vision and the willingness to invest right now in capabilities we need today, tomorrow, and long into the future.”
Rubio, in turn, claimed that the new initiative will be “critical” to rebuilding American industrial capacity.
“The U.S. Navy is the single biggest source of peace in the world, of all of our forces, because it gives us a global footprint,” he continued. “The ability to make things again in our country has been critical to what the president’s agenda has been all about, and this is a tangible reminder of it. And I know the country is grateful for it.”
Though Trump and Rubio suggested that construction of the new battleships would create manufacturing jobs in communities across the country, the president later clarified that the build-outs would rely heavily on “robotic factories.”
“We’re going to have a lot of robots helping us, because we need it,” he stated. “We’re going to need robots. We’re going to have robots, but that’s going to help us. We’re going to have tremendous workforce, and in order to operate, though, you’re always going to need people. You could have robots, but you have to get somebody to start those robots, and you’re going to have to improve the robots, but we’re going to have robotic factories, plus manpower.”
The president has taken a number of steps this year to boost American ship manufacturing, for both the U.S. military and the private sector, including starting construction on, as the president calls them, new “super duper” submarines and aircraft carriers.
However, last month, the Navy abandoned a plan to construct a new fleet of smaller, more mobile warships, citing production costs and delays, in order to speed the construction of the Trump-class line.
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You can watch Trump’s comments in full below.
