President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that he personally redesigned new Coast Guard ships for aesthetic reasons, because he's “a looks person.”
Trump was speaking virtually to service members at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thanksgiving when he made the comments.
His remarks come as the U.S. moves to expand and modernize its maritime law enforcement fleets amid China’s growing naval and coast guard presence in the Pacific.
Highlights
- Trump claimed he personally redesigned Coast Guard ships’ hulls for looks, stating, “I’m a looks person.”
- The Coast Guard is modernizing its fleet, expanding from 59 to 77 cutters, with new ships expected by 2028.
- The U.S. awarded $507 million to Bollinger Shipyards to build 10 new fast response cutters.
Donald Trump claimed he had a hand in redesigning the ships
Image credits: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The president was speaking about the Sentinel-class cutters, part of the Coast Guard’s ongoing modernization, when he claimed he had a hand in the design.
“We’ve ordered a lot of Coast Guard cutters, brand new, beautiful, the best machines in the world. The fastest, the best, the best maneuverability,” Trump said.
“I said, ‘How’s the speed and the maneuverability?’ I'm a looks person, I wanted the hull to be perfect, I sort of redesigned the hull a little bit – the hulls – but we ordered a lot.”
The Coast Guard recently awarded $507 million to Bollinger Shipyards in Louisiana to build 10 new fast response cutters.
Currently, 59 cutters are in service, and the fleet is expected to grow to 77 ships, with the first new vessel expected in 2028, according to the Coast Guard.
These ships will operate alongside the larger Coast Guard fleet of more than 250 vessels.
Trump also highlighted the U.S. icebreaker program, saying, “We have 11 of them being built right now; we only had one.”
The administration recently signed a multibillion-dollar agreement with Finland to build the first Arctic Security Cutters, a new fleet of icebreakers designed to boost U.S. operations in polar regions.
According to the White House, the Arctic Security Cutter program will begin with four ships built in Finnish shipyards.
Image credits: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The plan calls for future construction to move to U.S. shipyards, helping create American jobs and strengthen the domestic shipbuilding industry.
While the president described redesigning the cutters, Coast Guard vessels and icebreakers are designed by professional teams of naval architects and shipyards under Coast Guard and Navy acquisition programs.
The current Arctic Security Cutter and Polar Security Cutter designs are being produced by U.S. and Finnish-led industrial consortia, according to Newsweek.
The cutters are designed to allow the Coast Guard to operate year-round in the Arctic, safeguard shipping lanes, and respond to growing strategic and commercial activity in the region.
The program comes amid concerns over China’s expanding naval and coast guard presence.
The U.S. is expanding and modernizing its maritime law enforcement fleets
Image credits: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Pentagon estimates published in 2024 show China has more than 370 naval ships and submarines and over 150 coast guard vessels over 1,000 tons.
These forces have extended Beijing’s reach beyond East Asia, making fleet modernization a priority for the U.S.
So now, the Coast Guard is in the middle of its largest fleet recapitalization in decades.
The expansion is taking place against a backdrop of serious maintenance and readiness problems in the existing cutter fleet, according to a June 2025 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
The report says the Coast Guard relies on a fleet of 241 cutters, but since 2019, mission availability across that fleet has declined.
Image credits: Mike Hvozda/U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images
One key reason is a notable rise in equipment failures, with serious cutter maintenance issues increasing by about 21% from 3,134 in 2018 to 3,782 in 2023.
This has left cutters operating in a degraded state and at an increased risk of further maintenance issues, the GAO report noted.
The problems stem from deferred maintenance and difficulty obtaining obsolete or hard-to-find parts.
In 2024 alone, the Coast Guard deferred roughly $179 million in cutter maintenance — nearly nine times the inflation-adjusted maintenance deferrals reported in 2019.
As a result, crews have sometimes been forced to “cannibalize” ships — stripping working components from some cutters to repair others — in order to keep as many vessels operational as possible.
The GAO also found that staffing issues are a major challenge to operating and maintaining the cutter fleet, with vacancy rates increasing from about 5% in 2017 to 13% in 2024.