President announces a new class of Navy battleships at Mar-a-Lago, names the lead ship the USS Defiant, and says he will help design it because he is 'a very aesthetic person.'

OK. Monday afternoon at Mar-a-Lago. The ballroom. The press pool in the back. The Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Secretary of State, in suits, to the President’s left. The President, at the lectern, announces a new class of Navy battleship.

The Trump-class battleship. That is the name. Trump-class. Named after the sitting President. The lead ship will be the USS Defiant. The Navy press release, on Monday, confirms the class name, the lead ship name, and the schedule. The Navy press release is the Navy press release. I am not making this up. I cannot make this up.

Buddy. The U.S. Navy has not built a battleship since the Iowa-class, which was commissioned in the 1940s. The Iowa-class was the Mighty Mo and her sisters. The last one, Wisconsin, was decommissioned in 1991. The Navy has, for thirty-four years, not had battleships, on the doctrine that the aircraft carrier and the guided-missile destroyer are the modern surface combatants and the battleship is, in the language of the Navy War College, of historical interest. The Navy War College stands by that.

The Trump-class, the President said, will be the fastest, the biggest, and 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built. On the record. One hundred times more powerful is, in the technical sense, not a unit of measurement. The Iowa-class main batteries fired 2,700-pound shells. The Trump-class, per the press release, will fire guided missiles and, in the future, electromagnetic railguns, on the assumption that railguns exist by then, which the Office of Naval Research, on the public record, does not currently assume.

The schedule. First-of-class construction will not begin until 2030. That is five years from now. That is the next presidential term, plus a year. The first ship will not be afloat until, by the Navy’s projection, the late 2030s. The full class of twenty to twenty-five ships will not be in service until the 2050s. The 2050s.

The President, asked at the lectern what role he would play in the design of the new ship, said, I am a very aesthetic person, I would design the ship along with the Navy. Buddy. Aesthetic. That is the word he used. He is going to help design the battleship because he is aesthetic.

I have run a casino floor for thirty years. I have seen plenty of high rollers think they know how to design the slot machine on the basis of the trim around the screen. The trim around the screen is not the slot machine. The Navy, per the Navy War College, does not need a new battleship. What the Navy needs is more submarines. The submarines, in the press release, got a paragraph. The Trump-class got the wholepage.

I am arguing with the television. The television is in Palm Beach. The Palm Beach is aesthetic.