There's a reason they started mothballing all the battleships after WWII and didn't make any new ones to replace them. Battleships are defined by heavy armor belts which made them capable of shrugging off damage from the main guns of other ships. That is the naval definition of a battleship. The paradigm was the HMS Dreadnought launched by the British around 1900. The tradeoff is all that armor made them slow as hell and extremely immobile which makes them floating targets. But they were basically almost bulletproof, so it was a solid tradeoff. Doesn't matter if you can hit them easily if you can't sink them. The problem is during WWII people went all in on aircraft carriers that could shoot torpedoes or drop bombs on those battleships and sink them and radar guided fire control that made zeroing in on them easy. After WWII people invented chemical warheads (shaped charge) and sea skimming cruise missiles with huge warheads that could cut through anything and standoff guided missiles fired from airplanes out of range of battleship guns and all kinds of other crap that has no problem burning through armor belts no matter how thick it was. So what you end up with is big, slow, unmaneuverable ships with armor that can't stop any weapons designed to sink ships. That is why literally every navy in the world got rid of their battleships and nobody has made any for 50 years. The only reason Reagan reactivated them in the 80s was to use them as big floating gun barges to shoot deep onshore, but only when there was no chance of being shot at by opposing forces. You could only use them when you had total naval domination, and a very long period of time to stage them because they were so slow. If they really are actual by-the-definition battleships they are ****ing obsolete boondoggles and will be completely useless deathtraps in real modern naval conflict. They will be suicide machines. More likely they are cruisers or destroyers that Trump is choosing to call battleships because he thinks it sounds cool. That's major small dick energy, but I guess its better than sending thousands of Americans to their certain death so Trump can LARP as naval commander at The Battle of The Surigao Strait. Its either branding bullshit and ego onanism, or a dilettante going all in on the foolishness of hopelessly obsolete paradigm because he watched Victory at Sea too many times at 3am after an adderall binge. Neither is a particularly good look. I guess it'll make the rubes feel strong and stand up and cheer, though. That's about the only thing Trump's good at. I promise you every foreign navy is either scratching their head or laughing. Its like Trump just announced a new line of Trump-Sopwith Camel biplanes or new Trump branded horse cavalry divisions. A retro-navy is not a good idea. I know Trump wants to return the nation to the 1850s, but reinvesting in obsolete 19th century technology is taking it too far.
I don't think anyone is advocating rebuilding the Battleship Texas (WW1 era) or the Iowa class, or hell, even the Zumwalts. but admittedly, i'm not that sure what these ships are. at ~35k tons, they're considerably smaller than the Iowas, which were 60k tons. they're also bigger than the Zumwalts, which if memory serves, are the current largest US surface combatants (not including carriers). i follow several naval folk on X, and they all seem pleased with the announcement, if not the branding. if nothing else, keeping American shipyards busy is a good thing. Speaking of Dreadnought, this is an excellent book: https://a.co/d/9jF8GvM as is the sequel, Castles of Steel: https://a.co/d/7CAsXTN
