President Donald Trump wants a new armada of warships called the “Golden Fleet” to combat the threat from China, according to a report.
While the president is in the midst of a drastic demolition of the White House’s historic East Wing, he has also turned his attention to replacing the current mix of U.S. Navy warships, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Navy and senior Trump officials are reported to be in discussions for an ambitious new fleet that could ward off potential future threats from China. The reported plans come as the president is anticipated to take part in a high-stakes sit-down with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming days in his first visit to Asia since returning to power.
Warships in the so-called Golden Fleet would be fitted with powerful long-range missiles amid concerns that China is building and modernizing its own battleships at a rapid pace, officials told the WSJ.
“This battleship of tomorrow is going to be this thing that carries really long-range missiles,” Bryan Clark, a retired Navy officer and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is involved in the discussions, told the outlet.
The Pentagon and the White House are also reportedly in early discussions about plans to build a new 15,000 to 20,000-ton ship that would be heavily armored, potentially with hypersonic missiles, according to the outlet.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly hinted there would be a future announcement about the plans in a statement to the outlet. “Stay tuned!” she said, after touting Trump’s efforts to “bolster America’s maritime dominance.”
The president has long complained about the aesthetic of the Navy’s warships.
His former secretary during the first Trump administration, Mark Esper, recalled telling the president that warships “are built to fight and win, not win beauty contests,” he wrote in his memoir.
At a summit last month in Virginia where top American military leaders were summoned from their posts around the world, the president admitted he was “not a fan” of some of the Navy’s warships.
“They say, ‘Oh, it's stealth.’ I said, ‘That's not stealth.’ An ugly ship is not necessary in order to say you're stealth,” Trump complained.
Navy Secretary John Phelan revealed in February that Trump is so fixated on the issue that he was often texting him in the middle of the night to complain before Phelan was even confirmed by the Senate.
“President Trump has texted me numerous times very late at night, sometimes after one in the morning [about] rusty ships or ships in the yard, asking me what I’m doing about it,” Phelan said during his confirmation hearing.
Retired naval officer Mark Montgomery, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the administration should focus on fixing the current backlog of ship maintenance before launching a new fleet.
“The president’s aesthetic eye is not the proper paradigm to evaluate tactical ship requirements,” Montgomery told the WSJ.
The plans follow a directive earlier this year from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, ordering that the ship bearing the name of gay rights icon and Navy veteran Harvey Milk be renamed.
The Office of the Secretary of the Navy issued a memo in June revealing the plans to change the name of the replenishment oiler ship USNS Harvey Milk, which was christened in 2021.
Instances of renaming Navy ships are rare, and the process is taboo according to Navy traditions.
