Trump-class Battleship?

This is all over the news, so I’m not going to repeat the well researched article from theWarZone.com regarding Donald Trump’s announcement of two 30-40,000 ton warships, which won’t begin construction until the early 2030s.  

Trump appears unaware that he is reprising the failed Zumwalt-class destroyer concept - so expensive, long in development and poorly armed that only 3 were built.

image: USN, via twz.com
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More information will come to light as this program expands, but the new BBG(X) project will replace the current DDG(X) program, which replaced the CG(X) project that ran from 2001 to 2020. The US Navy has been trying to procure a major surface combatant class to replace the retiring Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers for 25 years, none of which have come to fruition, while the Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyers are new boats built on a maxed-out, forty-year-old hull design. 

While the USN does not need two gold-plated battleships in the 2030s that will be too expensive to operate and too politically glamorous to get in harms way, like the Russian Kirov-class showboats missile cruisers, the USN does need a major surface combatant with a high VLS capacity, and integrated command systems for fleet operations, to act as the core node of a surface task group escorting a carrier or amphibious group, and the Trump-class, which is a multi-billion dollar vanity project by a president who’s ego is bigger than the Death Star, may eventually emerge as a sensible 20,000+ ton surface combatants in the USN.

On December 27, 2025, here 6:48 in and above, Retired Navy Commander Bobby Jones very clearly states why Trump's Zumwalt 2.0 vanity project will not work.

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Update 29 December 2025

Military YouTuber @PerunAU has produced a comprehensive video on the Trump-class BBG(X) that is worth a view, and noticed that the announced dimensions are almost exactly the same as an Iowa-class battleship.

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