Draft-dodger Trump sure loves big battleships and military cosplay

President Donald Trump, the guy who was sent to a military high school where the bad kids go and then assiduously dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, has never served his country a day in his life.

Yes, that includes his terms as president. Trump serves himself, not his country

But Trump does love the trappings of being a military man, and oh boy does he love the big ships and planes that go vroom and boom. His little cosplay habit started young, trading the trappings of accomplishments for actual accomplishments. When it came time for Dear Donald to graduate from that military high school, he didn’t actually have medals for things like good conduct—so he just borrowed a dress jacket from someone who did, and showed off unearned medals in his senior portrait. 

That’s absolutely pathetic behavior, and it has continued to the present day. That’s why we’re now getting “Trump Class battleships” and we gotta get them so quick-like that Trump is trying to stuff the cost for them into the stopgap spending bill currently before Congress. 

The battleships, called the Golden Fleet because of course they are, are projected to cost $275 billion through 2056. Yes, a Congressional Budget Office analysis shows that the first one of these, which is going to be named “Defiant” (presumably because Trump is a defiant little toddler), would run us $23 billion, while the remaining 14 will be about $18 billion each. We’ll be paying for this for the next 30 years, long after Trump is dead. 

The CBO’s analysis is a bit threadbare, because the Navy hasn’t really bothered to release much detail about this great Golden Fleet. The details that have been released are for ships that would be conventionally powered, but Trump’s big bad boats are going to be nuclear-powered, and no one has bothered to explain what that kind of big change does in terms of cost. 

“The Navy revealed those specifications before deciding to use nuclear propulsion on the ship, a change that would significantly increase the cost of the ship and affect its design,” the CBO said.

But while the Trump administration isn’t providing much in the way of details, it does want much in the way of money. Trump is demanding that $1 billion be set aside right now so he can start getting parts, even though the defense panels that actually wrote the stopgap spending bills have said that no, we do not need to be full steam ahead to buy Trump some vanity battleships. 

Is it normal to throw $1 billion at something where even the GOP report urging Congress to give Trump that $1 billion notes that the Navy hasn’t yet finalized “ship design, completed a formal analysis of alternatives, or established a stable set of requirements”?

We should definitely spend ten figures first and establish design requirements later, because Trump is a Very Big Special Boy and this is his Very Big Special Boy Presidency.

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While we don’t have actual design details, we do know they will be the largest ships ever built because Trump is a tiny little man who thrives on yelling about being the biggest. 

Here’s the CBO again: “The ship would be the largest surface combatant in the world and larger than any surface combatant built for the Navy since World War II. It would be more than three and a half times the size of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer and more than twice the size of the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer.”

This is the same impetus behind Trump spending $7 billion to buy 11 new icebreaker ships, designed to, you guessed it, cut through Arctic ice. 

Do we need 11 icebreaker ships? Heavens, no!

Did the Coast Guard ask for 11 ships, figuring that this is the time to squeeze out every defense dime from this president? Nope!

This is twice as many icebreaker ships as the Coast Guard wanted, but Trump got jealous that Finland had icebreakers, so he did a private secret no-bid contract to buy 11 of them, to be built both here and in Finland.

Yes, a no-bid secret contract for $7 billion for 11 enormous ships. This is a thing that normally would involve an extensive process of agency justification and budgeting, establishing procurement requirements, open and transparent contract bidding, and so on. Instead, we just ordered everything on up, cash on the barrelhead, because the president is a special needy guy. 

This is no way to run a government. It’s even a stupid way to run a fleet of ships.

But Trump gets to feel important and pretend he’s a real military hero like Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, as in the pathetic AI slop he posted to that effect on Truth Social earlier this week. He even put himself in a general’s uniform, ribbons and all, flanked by the legendary World War II generals. 

Just like when he was a high school senior, Trump is too lazy to put in the work—but never too lazy to take the credit. Some things never change.