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CRIME UPDATE: Memphis, the murder capital of the nation, has seen a 50% drop in crime since Trump sent in the National Guard last year.
Overall, America's murder rate is down 18.1% in a single year, the largest drop in history. And that's not the half of it. America now has its lowest violent crime rate in 126 years.
But sure, keep blackpilling.
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
My friend @FredFleitz on some real progress toward reforming the UN!
My new @theamgreatness article on UN Amb @michaelgwaltz 's major wins to reform and depoliticize the UN. @A1Policy @USUN
"Washington has simply stopped writing blank checks to UN bodies it considers unreformable."
amgreatness.com/2026/09/25/h…
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Trump, Xi, and the Difference Between Diplomacy and Trust
Cary Dunst and I discuss how the U.S.-China trade truce can serve both countries, even while America confronts Beijing’s aid to Iran and ends its dependence on Chinese supply chains.
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
I can't help you if you only see the few missteps. You can start here.
Trump’s Top 25 Achievements: The List Every Conservative Should Know and Use
Donald Trump doesn’t have an accomplishment problem. Republicans have an information problem. It’s on each of us to change that.
With the midterms coming, an astonishing number of Republican voters cannot name three things President Trump has accomplished. Which is remarkable when you consider that Donald Trump has accomplished more in a year and a half than any other president ever did in four.
Indeed, he has accomplished so much, so fast, across so many fronts that most people cannot keep up. The Enemedia buries the victories, while Republicans do an abysmal job of explaining them.
So here is the cheat sheet. It barely scratches the surface. And yet each and every item here is a game-changer, and your befuddled black-pilling friends need to know it.
This is not a list of promises. It’s a list of laws enacted, cases won, policies implemented, agreements secured, and measurable results.
You don’t have to memorize all 25. Learn five. And when somebody says Trump “hasn’t done much,” show them the receipts.
Trump Restored American Safety and Sovereignty
1. He made the border a real border again.
In a matter of months, Trump reduced illegal border crossings to their lowest level in half a century. Catch-and-release is finished. The wall is going up and even being expanded, “Remain in Mexico” is back, and the Administration reduced releases into the country by an incredible 99.9 percent.
2. He reversed mass migration.
America recorded negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least half a century. So far, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have left the country, whether voluntarily or involuntarily: more than 675,000 forcibly deported and the rest “self-deported.”
Many of those self-deportations were facilitated by the President’s innovative program to offer plane tickets and cash bonuses for illegals to leave, not only incentivizing good behavior but significantly reducing the cost of deportations. Citizenship and the law actually mean something again.
3. He signed the Laken Riley Act — and required detention of criminal illegal aliens.
Named for an innocent girl murdered by an illegal alien, the Laken Riley Act requires federal authorities to detain illegals arrested for theft, burglary, shoplifting, assaulting police, or any crime causing death or serious injury. It also lets states sue officials who refuse to enforce it.
Laken Riley should still be alive. This law will prevent tragedies like hers.
4. History’s biggest drop in violent crime, and the lowest violent crime rate in 126 years.
According to FBI data, violent crime in America dropped an incredible 9.7 percent in 2025 — the largest one-year decline in history. Murder fell 18.1 percent, robbery fell 18.5 percent. And America’s violent crime rate is its lowest since 1900.
This is what happens when you put the National Guard on the streets in crime-ridden blue cities: fewer victims, safer streets, and better futures for America’s poorest.
Trump Launched an American Industrial Supercycle
5. He made the 2017 tax cuts permanent…and better.
The One Big Beautiful Bill locked in the largest tax cut in modern history, including the doubled standard deduction, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and 100 percent expensing for factories and equipment. It also delivered No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime, an abolition of most taxes on Social Security benefits, and major relief for seniors.
Every Democrat voted no. With the 2017 act set to expire in December 2025, that would have resulted in the largest tax hike in American history.
6. He repealed 129 regulations for every new one.
In fiscal 2025, federal agencies finalized 646 deregulatory actions and just five regulatory actions: 129-to-1, and in nearly every case, the “one” was to repeal the others! OIRA says the savings exceeded those of Trump’s entire first term. That is more freedom, lower costs, and less bureaucratic sabotage.
Of these, the crown jewel was the repeal of Obama’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding”, the legal foundation for the Green New Scam’s vehicle mandates. EPA calls it the largest deregulatory action in American history and estimates that by itself, it will save Americans more than $1.3 trillion. Trump also killed the federal EV mandate, restored Americans’ freedom to buy the cars and trucks they actually want, and even eliminated the incentives behind the almost universally hated start-stop button.
7. He secured $18 trillion in announced investment commitments.
That’s nearly two-thirds the size of the entire American economy, building American factories, chip plants, data centers, energy projects, steel mills, shipyards, and supply chains employing American workers. Apple, Meta, NVIDIA, Micron, Hyundai, U.S. Steel, Ford, Taiwan Semiconductor, and many corporations and sovereign wealth funds are betting big on Trump’s America.
No President has ever done anything remotely like it. And it’s just getting started.
8. He made “reshoring” and “reindustrialization” real, not a slogan.
Ford is moving Lincoln production out of China. Toyota is shifting Tacoma production from Mexico to Texas. GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and others are expanding U.S. production. The capital equipment pouring into the country is the machinery that’s building the growing boom.
9. He replaced lopsided trade deals with balanced, reciprocal trade.
Trump used tariffs as leverage to reverse 80 years of lopsided trade deals that favored everyone but America, and to win new or improved agreements with trading partners accounting for more than half of global GDP. Those agreements open foreign markets, attack non-tariff barriers, defend strategic industries, and make it more profitable to build in America than to export American jobs.
10. He shifted global energy dominance from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America.
Once the world’s largest energy importer — “exporting” $700 billion a year to our enemies — America now outproduces Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. The U.S. is also setting new records in oil, natural gas, and LNG exports, becoming the first country ever to export more than 100 million metric tons of LNG in a year.
Trump also opened land, accelerated permits, expanded pipelines and export terminals, and made American energy a tool for prosperity and peace.
11. After four decades of nuclear paralysis, Trump brought five new reactors online in a single year.
For more than 40 years, not one new privately developed non-light-water reactor reached criticality in America. Trump ordered at least three by July 4, 2026. DOE delivered four by the deadline, then a fifth just one month later.
Decades of zero. One Trump summer: five. That is a genuine nuclear renaissance.
Trump Made Elections Matter Again
12. He broke the Deep State’s power to defy the elected branches.
In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time in 90 years that Article 2, Section 1 is still part of the Constitution: the President may fire subordinate officials in the executive branch, overturning the 1935 precedent that insulated “independent” agencies from voters’ control.
Ever wonder why elections often seem to change nothing? How about one President and 5,000 political appointees vs. 2.8 million unfireable, unaccountable bureaucrats? THAT is the “Deep State”.
Trump then made that victory real. For the first time in a century, all policy-making bureaucrats can now be fired for misconduct, incompetence, or defying lawful directives. The permanent bureaucracy no longer gets to veto the voters.
13. He ended nationwide injunction abuse.
In Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court sharply limited nationwide injunctions. A single, local, district judge should not be able to block a national policy for everyone, everywhere; and yet that’s exactly what they’ve done, nonstop, ever since Trump (and only Trump) took office in 2017.
In restricting that unconstitutional power, the Court kneecapped the Black Robe Bureaucracy’s favorite tool of unlawful judicial supremacy.
14. He shut down USAID as a left-wing slush fund and shadow government.
USAID had become a taxpayer-funded machine for exporting abortion, gender ideology, censorship, and left-wing politics. It had a bigger budget than the CIA and the State Department combined, absolutely no accountability whatsoever, and a penchant for overthrowing governments.
Trump terminated it — completely — and moved real humanitarian aid under the State Department. Immediately, seven socialist Latin American governments lost re-election. Coincidence?
15. He shrank Federal employment to its lowest level in 60 years.
From a high under Biden, the federal workforce is now its smallest since 1966. Workforce reductions, agency closures, and spending cancellations mean fewer bureaucrats paid to resist the voters.
What’s more, when Biden left office, 94 percent of federal employees “worked” from home. The Trump administration cracked down: as Elon Musk put it, “you can work from the office or you can pretend to work somewhere else.”
16. He expelled DEI from the federal government.
Trump eliminated federal DEI offices and barred race- and sex-based preferences across the executive branch. Government hiring and contracting are returning to merit and equality under the law, ending the grotesque Democrat idea that “fighting discrimination” requires the federal government to discriminate.
He Defended Faith and Family
17. He delivered sweeping pro-life reform.
In his first term, Trump delivered the judges that overturned the abominable Roe v. Wade. Hardly anyone believed it could be done, or that Trump would do it. But he did, and a half-century nightmare finally ended.
Since returning to office, Trump has enforced the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy prohibiting federal funding of foreign abortions, ended federal fetal-tissue research, strengthened conscience protections, protected Medicaid from funding large abortion providers, and pardoned 23 pro-life activists prosecuted by Biden’s weaponized Justice Department.
He’s also done everything within the Executive Branch’s power to defund Planned Parenthood. It would be nice if Congress did likewise.
No President has ever done more to protect life. No one.
18. He got men out of women’s sports, and restored biological reality to federal policy.
The United States government once again officially recognizes two sexes: male and female. Trump ended federal support for the chemical and surgical gender mutilation of children, stopped taxpayer funding of such irreversible abominations, and forced more than three dozen health systems to end or suspend their programs as well.
Trump also enforced Title IX as written: women and girls deserve their own teams, trophies, scholarships, and locker rooms. The NCAA and other athletic organizations changed their rules in response. After years of Democrats doing everything they could to destroy women’s sports and ruin girls’ lives, Trump’s administration protects women and girls again.
19. He enacted America’s first nationwide school-choice program — and launched Trump Accounts.
As part of the President’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump enacted America’s first-ever nationwide school choice program. The new Education Freedom Tax Credit helps fund scholarships for tuition, books, and other educational costs.
That’s on top of the new Trump Accounts, which give every child a tax-advantaged stake in America’s future, including a $1,000 federal seed for eligible newborns. Parents gain power. Bureaucracies lose it. And children learn first-hand about free markets and future orientation.
20. He targeted anti-Christian bias and discrimination.
Trump created the White House Faith Office, Religious Liberty Commission, and Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. He restored conscience protections and made clear that Christians do not surrender their First Amendment rights merely by entering public life.
He Restored Peace Through Strength and Put America First
21. He forced NATO to stop freeloading and increase defense spending by 250 percent.
For decades, wealthy European governments underfunded their militaries, effectively sending America the bill and using American taxpayers to subsidize their bloated welfare states. Trump forced NATO to replace its old two-percent-of-GDP spending target with an enormous five percent by 2035.
Allied spending is rising, American defense orders are soaring, and Europe is becoming a partner instead of a dependent.
22. He drove China out of the Caribbean.
China spent years building strategic beachheads at both ends of the Panama Canal, in Cuba, and in Maduro’s Venezuela. Trump forced Panama out of Belt and Road, expanded American security access around the Canal, and captured Maduro, who now sits in a New York jail cell awaiting trial.
Beijing’s planned encirclement of the United States collapsed. The Monroe Doctrine is back. Call it the Donroe Doctrine.
23. He brokered eight peace deals in just eight months.
In eight months, Trump brokered peace in eight conflicts spanning four continents, including wars that had gone on for as much as 40 years. It’s a record unmatched by any other President.
24. He launched and funded Golden Dome, the first-ever true missile defense for the U.S. population.
Ronald Reagan dreamed of making nuclear missiles obsolete through his Strategic Defense Initiative. Today, Trump is actually building it: a layered homeland shield with space-based sensors and interceptors, conventional defenses, and new technologies including microwave systems to destroy drone swarms and directed-energy weapons (yes, lasers) that can replace an $11 million missile with $2 of electricity.
Congress has funded the initial $25 billion, with far more on the way once it passes the NDAA this fall. Better a shield than a sword.
25. He restored the warrior ethos — and reversed the recruiting crisis.
After years of missed targets under Biden, every active military component met or exceeded its 2025 recruiting goal. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refocused the newly renamed Department of War on actually winning wars, while pouring resources into shipbuilding, munitions, drones, missile defense, and America’s atrophied industrial base.
Young Americans once again believe their Commander-in-Chief is worth serving. And they’re showing up en masse.
Now Act Like It Matters
Those are not tweets or campaign promises. They are changes in law, power, investment, sovereignty, culture, and the structure of the Republic itself. And they’re just the top 25: I could give you hundreds more.
Midterms are turnout elections. We do not need to convince Democrats to love Donald Trump. We need Republicans and friendly independents to understand what is at stake — and to show up.
And let’s be clear. When you say (as some of you will) “the Republicans need to do a good enough job telling this story”, you’re pointing at yourself. You are “the Republicans.” The Democrats don’t rely exclusively on their elected officials to tell their story: everyone from their media lackeys to their lowest-level supporters are constantly spreading their “news”, whatever that “news” happens to be.
Today’s conservatives have more ability to find whatever you want to know than any group of people in human history, yet half of them couldn’t name any of the accomplishments in this essay, and if they were to read it, they would just complain that something else they wanted hasn’t happened fast enough to suit them.
This is called “black-pilling.” It’s a loser mindset, and if you engage in it, you deserve to lose: horribly, painfully, personally. And guess what: you will, unless people who are serious step up to save you. Which is frankly pathetic, but for the rest of our sakes, necessary.
So tell people our story. Donald Trump is delivering great things, whether or not heaven on earth has broken out quite yet. Do the work, send the team he needs to Washington to finish the job, and get ready for 2028 afterward.
Take the time to learn at least five of these victories. Share this list with someone who needs it. And vote as though the most consequential Presidency in modern history depends on what you do.
Because it does.
(Oh, and those receipts? Follow the link in my bio to get them all.)
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
CRIME UPDATE: Memphis, the murder capital of the nation, has seen a 50% drop in crime since Trump sent in the National Guard last year.
Overall, America's murder rate is down 18.1% in a single year, the largest drop in history. And that's not the half of it. America now has its lowest violent crime rate in 126 years.
But sure, keep blackpilling.
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
The Greenland Triumph Is a Sea Change in U.S. Foreign Policy
The deal is everything we could ask for, and infinitely more than the Enemedia told you was possible. But the bigger news is the agreement’s implications for the rest of the world.
With today’s signing of the tripartite deal between the United States, Greenland, and Denmark, Donald Trump has achieved yet another masterstroke — like the NATO commitment to increase defense spending more than two-and-a-half times, like the EU trade deal, like booting China out of Panama — that the Enemedia unanimously told you was not merely impossible, but laughable.
Lesson: don’t listen to the Enemedia. It’s not just that they’re biased. They’re also almost always wrong.
To quote Greenland Premier Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the “world has changed a great deal since 1951,” referring to the original security agreement. The people of Greenland “recognize the long-term security threats that you, Mr. President, have rightly spoken about.”
“This agreement should put to rest any doubt today and in the future about where Greenland’s loyalty lies,” Nielsen said.
Indeed.
The deal itself is important, but not so important as what it represents. We’ll come back to that in a bit: it’s the part you most need to understand.
Trump’s enemies are out in force saying the President achieved nothing he didn’t already have. That position proves only that their time horizon is that of a toddler. What the Greenland deal gives the United States is perpetuity: no matter what happens in Denmark, Greenland, or some future Eurabia, U.S. rights in Greenland survive.
Key points:
1. Under the prior deal, U.S. rights only lasted so long as Greenland was part of Denmark, and so long as NATO exists (or the U.S. remained a member). All of that is gone.
2. Under the (foolish) 2004 amendments to the treaty, George W. Bush gave up our basing rights outside Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base). Those rights are now restored, allowing a significantly expanded U.S. presence for Golden Dome, for interdiction of enemy fleets in the GIUK Gap, and for such other needs as may arise.
3. The U.S. now has an absolute veto over military access and even strategic investments by any non-NATO ally. The Chinese and Russian initiatives toward Greenland are now thwarted, forever.
These things matter, a lot. But there’s more.
A Sea Change in U.S. Foreign Policy
For decades, American foreign policy has assumed the permanence — and the permanent utility — of various international organizations and agreements. This has continued long after the utility of many of them has disappeared.
NATO is a key example. Did NATO once have utility? Absolutely: in the beginning it shored up nations lying in ruins under the American aegis. Later, our allies contributed essential forces and expenditures to oppose a Soviet threat that grew almost until the day it collapsed.
That ended in 1991. When it did, the foreign policy establishment did not adjust. They reasoned from the long-held presumption that NATO was essential not just to peace but to survival. They did not rethink that presupposition when the facts on the ground changed.
So American leaders of both parties allowed Europe’s (and Canada’s) militaries to atrophy, allowing them to freeload on the American taxpayer while subsidizing stifling anti-competitive economies and a vast Islamic invasion. They did so because, to them, the alternative was unthinkable.
Am I arguing that NATO cannot be valuable? Absolutely not: I think an alliance of (mostly) free countries with strong militaries that support one another and deter aggression by unfree powers is tremendously worthwhile.
Moreover, I would be happy for that alliance to be NATO, and for there to be other such alliances (like AUKUS, or the Quad, or the growing informal Asian NATO, or the military cooperation inherent in the Abraham Accords) that serve the same role.
What I’m arguing is that NATO is not currently valuable, or at least that it hasn’t been for a long time. If it rearms — as Trump has singlehandedly strongarmed it into doing — that can change. Otherwise, it’s just another American welfare program. And that does not serve the interests of the American people. It is actually a net-negative.
Yet Washington’s presuppositions remained, and but for Trump’s team, remain. NATO is less an alliance than a religion, one in which America is supposed to pay permanent penance (for what is unclear) to its European “betters” by giving them free stuff. Whole Beltway think tanks exist to tell us the importance of this ritual.
Trump’s sacrilege in questioning that is the source of much of the irrational hate spewed in his (and your and my) direction. He’s “obviously” a madman, or an idiot, or a traitor.
Many of the same people, or the people who hired them, said the same of Reagan.
Trump’s view is entirely different, and it is best summarized thus:
1. The government of the United States has the right to tax the people of the United States because of its corresponding duty to protect the people of the United States.
2. No international arrangement that fails to serve that purpose is legitimate.
3. No treaty, and no “friendship” among nations, is permanent; and therefore each country must do whatever it must to secure its people long after such things might end.
This is where time horizon comes into play. And the world got an object lesson in Diego Garcia.
Diego Garcia is America’s most important base in that most important area, the Indian Ocean. It is in the Chagos Islands, a British possession and thus supposedly safe. The deal establishing the base was for 70 years. Socialist former Prime Minister Keir Starmer negotiated a deal to extend that for 99 more.
The catch is how he went about it. For reasons known only to God, Starmer’s deal included a transfer of the island chain to distant Mauritius, a Chinese client state 1,250 miles away that has never in history ruled the islands. The President rightly called this “an act of great stupidity”.
Now, if this is what a supposedly close ally and one of the world’s handful of nuclear powers will do under the wrong government, what might tiny Denmark do in the course of the next half-century?
Trump succeeded in blocking the deal's implementation. But he learned the lesson. Alliances are not forever; nor are allies always mindful of our interests. The American President has a duty to protect the American people, not to soothe the feelings of freeloading foreigners.
As Lord Palmerston put it, nations do not have permanent friends, only permanent interests. So long as those interests align, that’s swell. But if you think they’re going to align forever, you need to go read some history.
That’s the greater significance of the Greenland deal. Henceforth, American foreign policy will stop assuming that impermanent things are forever. We don’t know whether there will even be a NATO in 50 years. We don’t know if we’ll still want to be part of it. We don’t know if Greenland will be independent, or thoroughly dependent on a new Denmarkistan, or the CCP.
So henceforth, America will plan for uncertainty. We will grow up. And we will not plan our future security around wishes, ponies, and unicorn farts. Those days are over.
Will Greenland Join the United States?
So will Greenland join the United States? In the short term, Trump’s objectives have been met exactly as in Panama: we have “taken back” the Canal not through conquest or a transfer of sovereignty but by booting out the Chinese and reestablishing American bases. As is always the case with Trump, the opening position is always grander than the actual aim, so that the aim may be achieved.
The people who don’t understand this, after all these years of Trump, should not be allowed anywhere near a car dealership.
What one must not miss, however, is the long term. Greenland has every reason to want to be free of Denmark: what it doesn’t have is the ability to pay for it. In the real world, it turns out that matters.
Greenland’s 57,000 people have no means to develop their own island. Neither does Denmark, which lacks both the cash and the tech to do so. The result is an impoverished island dependent on what Denmark can provide: welfare, to the tune of about $1 billion per year. 72 percent of Greenland’s people are under 40. And they have no future.
America provides a pathway out of that. The new bases will be big employers. The development that follows will pour money into the island’s economy, first in investment, later in profits and royalties to the islanders. As the economy booms, the independence Greenland has long demanded but simultaneously failed to act upon will become affordable.
Moreover, today’s agreement marries Greenland to the United States in perpetuity. That provides a pathway to the sort of Compact of Free Association the U.S. currently has with Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia: all the independence, none of the costs. Remarkable what a tiny population can achieve when it doesn’t have to pay for embassies or a military.
Today’s deal makes that the island’s logical future.
But the truth is, it really doesn’t matter. Today Trump got everything he actually wanted in Greenland. He also established a longer view of U.S. foreign policy needs. Americans should not be held hostage to the feelings of those who depend upon it. America is a net positive for virtually the whole world, but it can only remain so if its own security is, well, secured.
Today was a big step, long overdue, in that direction. And as with NATO’s 5 percent commitment, it never would have happened under any other President.
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Chinese Scientists Just Made the Case for Trump’s New Battleship
China just proved my point: the logic of the new technologies requires larger hulls, not smaller. America needs all fifteen BBGNs now — with the power and space for fifty years of American innovation.
When Donald Trump announced his vision for 15 Trump-class battleships, the Enemedia and much of the defense establishment reacted in derision: the whole idea was “ridiculous,” and “dead on arrival.” Which, of course, is also what they said about Trump’s Greenland deal until it was signed, yesterday.
So imagine the inconvenience of having Chinese naval scientists make Trump’s case for him.
According to a September 7 report in the South China Morning Post, researchers at the PLA’s Dalian Naval Academy propose using large-caliber naval guns to fire shells that burst near a swarm, scattering fragments across multiple drones. Instead of buying an expensive missile engagement for each cheap attacker, the gun would attack an area containing several of them. Low tech, big guns, high return.
Of course, that’s exactly why you’d need a battleship. Indeed, that’s why we built them a century ago (the firepower, not the drones). Such a ship could meaningfully contribute to the air defenses of an entire Carrier Strike Group. But it would need to be big. If China’s about to build them, you also need a lot of them.
But bigger hulls mean more than just added space for large guns. They also mean bigger power plants for electricity-driven systems — lasers and railguns — and more space for the Vertical Launch System cells on which the Navy currently depends. VLS consists of modular launch tubes with rapid multi-mission responsiveness and 360-degree target-engagement capability. Each VLS cell can hold and fire different types of missiles: land attack, air defense, anti-ship, whatever the mission demands. The more cells a ship has, the more punch it can pack.
The catch? VLS cells have to be pre-loaded in port before the ship deploys. Run out of missiles and you have to go home. So more cells matter.
But America is losing cells, not gaining them. The 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers now finishing retirement carried 122 cells apiece, 2,684 across the class. Likewise, the four Ohio-class guided-missile submarines (SSGNs) can carry up to 154 Tomahawks each, for another 616 much-in-demand missiles hidden beneath the sea.
Together, roughly 3,300 sea-based launch positions, out of a total of 8,120 in the entire U.S. Navy, will disappear over the next two years. Replacing them may take well into the 2040s.
That would be dangerous in any era. It’s especially foolish right now. China is rapidly building the world’s largest navy — perhaps now even including battleships — backed by a shipbuilding industry so much larger than ours that the comparison is embarrassing. China’s commitments are regional: America’s are global, which is to say, spread out. The enemy can concentrate forces, and it’s building them fast.
The Navy plans fifteen Trump-class BBGNs carrying 128 Mk 41 cells apiece, plus larger launchers for hypersonic and future weapons. That means 1,920 standard VLS cells restored to the fleet aboard ships designed to defend a Carrier Strike Group, or to strike out on their own.
VLS would be reason enough to expedite construction of significantly bigger warships. But it’s not the only one. The Chinese idea has legs. So does directed-energy — lasers — which are already operational as Israel’s “Iron Beam” air defense, and which the Navy has now tested in combat.
Understood this way, the Trump class is an offensive monster, but it’s also an air-defense fortress for our carriers, an independent cruiser, and a platform with enough electrical power to operate those directed-energy weapons and railguns as they grow bigger, more powerful, and more power-hungry. It also gives the Navy a first-in-kind platform designed for constant upgrades as new technologies arrive.
The BBGN is not a replacement ship. It’s a strategic leap. It’s also a design philosophy.
This is the thing the technology-illiterate Beltway can’t grasp: The logic of the new technologies drives hulls larger, not smaller. A properly armed carrier or battleship is not a “sitting duck.” It’s a force of nature.
And China knows it.
A Fifty-Year Hull Should Stay First Rate for Fifty Years
A warship commissioned now has to be at the top of its game all the way out to 2080. When you consider how much technology has changed from the 1970s to now, or from the 1920s to the 1970s, that’s a pretty daunting task.
And yet America has gotten very good at exactly that.
The Mk 41 VLS entered service under Reagan. The missiles it carries have changed repeatedly, and they’ll just keep changing. Tomahawks have gained new range and accuracy, new guidance systems, and new missions. Standard Missiles have evolved from fleet air defense into ballistic-missile defense and anti-ship weapons. ESSMs can be packed four to a cell. The launcher has remained not just useful but vital because the Navy didn’t design it around one weapon, one threat, or one era.
That is the Trump-class design philosophy writ large.
The BBGN is a nuclear-powered weapons platform that can evolve throughout that time, precisely because it’s huge and it’s nuclear-powered. The establishment wants to keep cramming more into Arleigh Burke destroyers, but that’s a dead end. There’s simply not enough room in those hulls, and they can never have the power generation the 21st century is already beginning to demand.
Over the century ahead, virtually everything aboard the Trump-class will change. Their missiles will get faster and smarter. Their sensors will see farther. Their computers will make today’s look like a calculator. Directed-energy weapons will grow in power, evolving from an experiment to primary air defense to main armament. Systems not yet conceived will replace equipment that today seems cutting-edge.
That’s the reason to build big.
At 35,000 tons, the Trump class starts with what the 9,700-ton Burkes no longer have: margin. Not waste, not empty space for its own sake, but room for whatever fifty years of invention might produce. The Navy’s own shipbuilding plan says the ship should ensure that “the hull forms of today do not constrain the genius of tomorrow.”
That may be the wisest sentence anyone in the Pentagon has written in decades.
The critics say the tech is “insufficiently mature”. That’s just nonsense. It ignores the VLS problem that the larger hulls help solve. But even more than that, in the 1920s, no one postponed aircraft-carrier construction just because planes were still primitive.
Ford-class carriers will operate aircraft that don’t exist yet, and thanks to their nuclear power plants, laser-based air defenses as well. We built the flight deck precisely because we knew the aircraft would evolve.
And they did, fast.
The same is true here. VLS is mature. Nuclear propulsion is mature. Aegis is mature. Large-caliber naval guns are certainly mature, even if the Chinese have found a new (and advantageous) use for them. If the best railgun or laser available when USS Defiant commissions is not the best available ten years from now, well duh. We’ll replace it. That’s exactly what a platform is for.
The BBGN answers an immediate missile crisis. That’s very real. But it also spends America’s money far better than any ship class before it, precisely because it’s so intentionally extensible.
The Most Versatile Ship in the Navy
Between its size and nuclear power, the Trump-class ships will be the most versatile in the Navy.
As part of a Carrier Strike Group, a BBGN’s reactors can keep pace with the carrier regardless of speed or distance, while bringing a missile magazine deeper than any other surface combatant. Even more important, it can bring enough electrical power to defend the whole formation with directed energy rather than one-shot missiles and ammunition.
That’s more consequential than the 128 VLS cells. It will only become more so.
Modern air defense has an ugly economic problem. An enemy can launch $30,000 drones or rockets and force an American ship to fire million-dollar interceptors against them. That’s crazy. It’s also unsustainable.
Directed energy upends that math. For around $2 per shot, lasers and high-powered microwave systems can deal with many of the cheap, massed threats using electricity, preserving Standard Missiles for the aircraft, ballistic missiles, and hypersonics that actually require them. Lasers don’t replace kinetic interceptors, at least not initially. They augment and preserve them.
In this case, they preserve VLS.
That makes nuclear propulsion far more than a matter of speed and endurance. The reactor powers the sensors that find the threat, the electronic systems that disrupt it, and the directed-energy weapons that destroy much of it, all without consuming a single missile. Every drone burned down by a laser leaves another VLS round available, thus extending that essential capability even more than was accomplished by deploying more cells.
A Carrier Strike Group built around both a Ford-class CVN and a Trump-class BBGN would be a monster. The carrier brings the air wing. The battleship brings massive missile firepower, fleet command, and an essentially inexhaustible defensive magazine. The destroyers and submarines expand the group’s sensors, anti-submarine warfare, missile defense, and offensive reach.
There would be nothing like it in the world. Or in all of history.
And note well: the BBGN does not replace the destroyers. It makes them more important.
Every additional carrier group, Amphibious Ready Group, lightning carrier, and battleship formation requires more Aegis coverage, more anti-submarine warfare, more ballistic-missile defense, and more distributed sensors. The BBGN lets destroyers be destroyers again, rather than forcing them to double as the cruisers the Navy stopped building.
There’s another option. A battleship-led Surface Action Group would be formidable in its own right. A BBGN accompanied by Burkes, attack submarines, unmanned systems, and maritime patrol aircraft could operate far from a carrier while presenting an enormous threat to any hostile fleet, coastline, or sea lane. Moreover, its command spaces allow an admiral and staff to direct a major operation from sea rather than depending entirely on a land base that may be politically unavailable or vulnerable to attack.
And there’s a third role. The Navy stopped building cruisers. It couldn’t eliminate the need for them.
The Trump class restores that independent capital-ship role, but on a far greater scale. A BBGN can secure a chokepoint, reinforce an ally, protect commercial shipping, or appear off a hostile coast without requiring half a destroyer squadron to make it survivable.
America’s interests are too broad to make every naval operation carrier-dependent. We need enough carriers to dominate the most important theaters, and capital ships capable of creating powerful independent formations everywhere else.
That’s what cruisers were for. The role never disappeared. The Navy just forgot.
The Need Is Now
Donald Trump is always thinking about the future. Yesterday’s Greenland deal isn’t about next year or the next NATO summit: it’s about 50 or 100 years from now when alliances may have shifted and new threats may have emerged. That’s true across the President’s foreign policy initiatives, from Venezuela to Indonesia.
His proposal for 15 Trump-class battleships caught Washington off guard, and they reacted as they always do when the President proposes anything: derision and dismissal combined with confident predictions that it will never, and can never, happen.
They’re wrong. Nearly always. And they’re especially wrong about this.
At present, the first Trump-class isn’t expected until 2036. But by 2036, the Ticonderoga CGs and Ohio SSGNs will be long gone, and China will have spent another decade widening a truly dangerous shipbuilding advantage. It is now clear that Xi’s navy is likely to build the very sort of large surface combatants Trump is proposing. A program that arrives after that multifaceted crisis isn’t a strategy. It’s an obituary.
Perhaps we should give the contract to SpaceX or Anduril. They get it. They’re forcing the Pentagon to get it. Congress has not yet caught up.
But the answer is clear. Commit now to all fifteen. Buy long-lead materials in blocks. Expand the reactor and supplier base before scarcity becomes another excuse for delay. Give the yards enough certainty to hire and train the skilled workers they lack, and enough volume to invest in the equipment needed to build far faster.
America needs the Trump-class. And it needs them now.
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
This is the today’s Democrat Party. If it isn’t scaring you, you aren’t paying attention.
"I will throw you in prison. I want Chinese style communism to happen inside of the democratic party right now. I want to do cultural revolution shit."
Hamas Piker just flat out admits he wants to imprison and kill democrats in a literal communist revolution. These are animals.
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
Maybe it’s time to kick this clown out of NORAD.
🚨Breaking News: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced his Government has spent time recently preparing for the possibility that President Trump could order a U.S. military invasion against Canada
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Rod D. Martin retweeted
But we've still got stupid American feminists prattling on about "The Handmaid's Tale" and supporting the monsters who actually did it.
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