Trump-Class Battleship Concept Sparks Debate Over Cost and Utility

According to Wang Lei and his team from the People’s Liberation Army’s Dalian Naval Academy, these guns could fire prefabricated-fragment shells that would explode near a drone swarm, creating a high-speed cloud of fragments capable of damaging multiple targets within an area.

The Trump-class battleship, announced in December as part of the president’s proposed “Golden Fleet”, is designed to combine an extensive missile capacity with nine large naval guns and other electromagnetic weapons.

The proposal has raised questions from experts and social media commenters alike about whether concentrating so much firepower on a single, extremely expensive platform makes sense in an era of long-range missiles and unmanned weapons.

One US online commenter ridiculed the plan as “designed by a rich moron with no concept of practicality or functionality”, while another joked that the ships would be “quite literally gold-plated”, in a mocking reference to their perceived wastefulness and extreme cost.