America’s architect-in-chief

Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Robert Smalls, formerly named USS Chancellorsville, approaches the USS Ronald Reagan before a fueling-at-sea in the Pacific Ocean on July 1, 2025. The ship was renamed the Robert Smalls in March 2023. (Eric Stanton/U.S. Navy)

By Bruce Botelho

President Trump’s staff and cabinet are constantly distracting him from his main mission. They ask him to focus on the Strait of Hormuz (“American territory”), tariffs on the soon-to-be 51st state, the war in Ukraine, and letters to his good friend Kim Jong Un, to name a few. And he needs time for his own hobbies: terrorizing his enemies real and imagined through government investigations and lawsuits, disrupting the November general election and planning Mar-a-Lago on the beaches of Gaza.

These issues have obscured his true passion and mission: to be America’s architect-in-chief. He has set about remolding the nation’s capital with single-minded purpose, not seen in at least four generations. These include the successful renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the addition of a ballroom to the White House, golf course renovations, the national garden of American heroes, a helipad, and an arc de Trump to out-arc the Arc de Triomphe.

One can gag on the president’s architectural tastes and challenge the wisdom of the changes, but little more than aesthetics is at stake. Unfortunately, Trump’s architectural eye has turned to a much more consequential target: the United States Navy.

In December, Trump announced a Trump-class of battleship for very large guided-missile surface combatants that could concentrate exceptional firepower, missile-defense capacity, and command facilities in a single hull. It would weigh roughly 30,000 to 40,000 tons and come in at about 840–880 feet long — far larger than an Arleigh Burke destroyer, although slightly shorter than an Iowa-class battleship. The prototype is expected to cost roughly $23 billion, the overall construction program (not yet approved) roughly $275 billion. For comparison purposes, the total proposed price tag for the 11-vessel U.S.–Finland icebreaker program is approximately $6.1 billion (though some later reports and estimates place the full broader scope closer to $7 billion). There are compelling arguments both for and against this Trump class of battleships, but in this case the president has the prerogative to put his thumb on the scale.

In contrast, Trump’s Aug.13 executive order directing the U.S. Navy to abandon the use of electromagnetic catapults in favor of steam power to launch fixed-wing aircraft from aircraft carriers, starting with the USS Doris Miller that is already under construction (and rumored to be christened the USS Donald J. Trump instead) is an irresponsible — but still revocable — step over the line. Trump has long ruminated about steam catapults, but he should not be entitled to substitute his personal taste for the expertise, law, planning, operational needs, and fiscal discipline intended to safeguard the nation’s defense.

As Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, recently noted in a column in the Washington Post (August 19, 2026): “The change is estimated to cost billions of dollars and delay the ship’s launch into the late 2030s. And that’s only if the Navy can convince a manufacturer to start building steam catapults again after a nearly three-decade hiatus.”   

On the heels of the Aug.13 executive order, the Navy has been asked to consider a major redesign of the “island”, an aircraft carrier’s command center, so that it is shifted from current designs aft of the platform to the World War II configurations midship in order to conform to Trump’s preferred vision of carriers. The consequences once again are staggering:  a reversion to models that reduce safety, efficiency of operation, and recalibration of buoyancy, corresponding increases in delay by years in replacing the 1960s Nimitz-class carriers still in operation today, and untold billions of dollars in redesign costs.

Trump’s amateur intrusion into naval shipbuilding has got to stop. Alaska’s Sen. Dan Sullivan is in an optimal position to defend the nation from this overreach. He is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate’s principal authorizing and oversight committee for military ship construction. He chairs its Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support and is a member of its Subcommittee on Seapower. He and his colleagues should demand a full accounting of whether the changes are strategically justified, fiscally prudent, and not detrimental to the nation’s long-term security.

Let’s be clear: the Aug. 13 order is not simply a choice between some old-fashioned lever and a digital screen. It tells the Navy to redesign the fourth ship of a new carrier class around technologies it had spent years replacing — after construction work was already substantially complete. His Trump-class battleship, a prestige vessel unavailable for a decade, may be obsolete before it hits the waves, particularly given the exponential growth in drone and other AI-assisted technologies of waging war. Returning to World War Two vintage carrier configurations only leaves us further in the wake of our maritime adversaries.   

Please return Trump to redesigning the Rose Garden.

• Bruce Botelho is a former Juneau mayor, former Alaska attorney general, and current president of the Juneau Independent’s board of directors. This piece represents Botelho’s personal views and does not represent the views of the Independent.