“As Commander in Chief, it is my great honor to announce that I have approved a plan for the Navy to begin construction of two brand-new large warships, the largest ever built to date.” So Donald Trump yesterday, not at the White House or on a Navy base, but in his Mar-a-Lago golf club, a new Versailles of a president who now believes himself to be a sovereign.
But the choice of location is just a detail. The news is that the new class of warships (“the fastest, largest and, by far, 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built”) will be named after the American president. They will be ships of the “Trump class” and the president has assured that he will directly take care of the “aesthetics” of these deadly war machines.
The announcement came a few hours after another Trump decision that created a stir: the nomination of Jeff Landrycurrent governor of Louisiana, as special envoy for Greenland, with the aim of bringing the region under Washington’s control.
“We were under the illusion that Trump had forgotten about Greenland, but no,” he commented bitterly in the Danish newspaper Politiken (Greenland has been part of the Kingdom of Denmark for over 600 years, but gained substantial autonomy in 1979). Representatives of the Danish and Greenlandic institutions also responded harshly to Trump. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders and the United States will not take it over,” the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, and her Greenlandic counterpart, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, declared in a joint statement.
Words that will have left Trump quite indifferent, since he has repeatedly invoked United States sovereignty over Greenland, not ruling out the use of military force to take control of it.
In this story, then, a detail is striking: the special envoy for Greenland appointed by Trump is the governor of a state that the United States bought from France in 1806. Louisiana takes its name from the King of France Louis XIV, to whom the French explorers dedicated the territory.
These decisions by Trump and his posture in general are establishing him as a sovereign who can decide everything at home and in the rest of the world. “In his first year in office, Trump has brazenly adopted the trappings of kingship, just as he has asserted his virtually unlimited power to transform American government and society at will,” he wrote two days ago in the New York Times the journalist Peter Bakerthe chief White House correspondent who has covered the last six presidential terms. “Nearly 250 years after the American colonists revolted against their king, this is probably the closest the country has come, in a period of general peace, to the centralized authority of a monarch,” Baker adds.
For Baker, “Trump no longer holds back, nor is he held back, as in his first term. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to replace it with a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his birthday as a holiday with free admission to national parks—all of this speaks to personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with little resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.”
“Now Trump is using his executive power very aggressively,” he acknowledged in an interview with Corriere della Sera conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
And we still don’t know what King Trump will have planned for the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, scheduled for July 4, 2026. Trump has already put a task force and we can be sure that he will want to have his say on everything.
