What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday announced he was working with the U.S. Navy to design and build a “Trump class” fleet of “battleships” that would form a centerpiece of America’s revamped “Golden Fleet.” The new warships will “be the fastest, the biggest and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, standing alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Navy Secretary John Phelan and renderings of the proposed vessel. The last U.S. battleship was decommissioned in 1992.

Who said what
Trump said construction would begin “almost immediately” on the first of up to 25 Trump-class ships, the USS Defiant, which would be delivered in “two and a half years.” A U.S. official told The Associated Press that construction was planned to begin in the early 2030s. “There is no funding in the current Pentagon budget” for the warships, Politico said.

The new ships, as described by Trump, “will be armed with hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, rail guns and high-powered lasers,” the AP said, “all technologies that are in various stages of development by the Navy,” with some previously abandoned as impractical. Massive new $5 billion warships are “exactly what we don’t need” to defend “against the Chinese threat,” retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Wall Street Journal. “They are focused on the president’s visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship.”

What next?
“This ship is never going to sail,” Mark Cancian, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Washington Post. He predicted it would “take four, five, six years” to just develop the ship. Trump said he would meet with defense contractors in Florida next week to accelerate production.

What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday revived his early-term campaign to take control of Greenland, a self-ruling territory of NATO ally Denmark. Trump has publicly coveted the large Arctic island’s mineral wealth, but “we need Greenland for national security, not for minerals,” he told reporters yesterday. “We have to have it,” he added, and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) will “lead the charge.” 

Who said what
Trump unexpectedly named Landry (pictured above) as his “special envoy to Greenland” on Sunday. Landry said on social media yesterday he would work to “make Greenland a part of the U.S.” in his new “volunteer position,” which “in no way affects my position as Governor of Louisiana!” It’s illegal to “annex another country,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a joint statement. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders, and the U.S. shall not take over Greenland.” 

Trump’s fixation on Greenland “gradually drifted out of the headlines” following his initial push, The Associated Press said. But Danish officials protested in August after “at least three people with connections to Trump” reportedly “carried out covert influence operations in Greenland.” And earlier this month, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service assessed that the U.S. was using its economic power to “assert its will” and threaten military force against both friends and foes.

What next?
Opinion polls in Greenland “show overwhelming opposition to becoming part of the US,” the BBC said. And Trump’s refusal to “rule out using force to secure control of the island” has “shocked Denmark.” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told local media yesterday he was “deeply outraged” by the developments and would summon U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Ken Howery for an explanation.