30 seconds of a vintage game box makeover
The White House strategy has been evident for many months: Trump likes to flood the media with a relentless surge of news content to dominate the day and suppress competing other newsworthy events.
I put a strikethrough on “other” because I define newsworthiness as content people need and/or want to know.
It’s a living
Nobody will confuse me with a qualified military strategist, but 17 years of my career in the graphic arts have been spent working for defense contractors. By assimilation alone, I absorbed a sense of how the military-industrial complex works. I was proud to work on the marketing and proposal teams, helping these companies—Bell Aerospace, Comptek Amherst Systems, and Northrop Grumman—secure contracts and keep us gainfully employed. The following words about this necessary evil were spoken by outgoing President Eisenhower in 1961.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. . . . American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Source: Eisenhower farewell address
Fugly frigates
As soon as Trump rolled out his proposal for a naval “Golden Fleet,” I knew what would follow. From Trump’s December 22 press conference at Mar-a-Lago, there’s this:
The US Navy will lead the design of these ships along with me, because I'm a very aesthetic person, …
and this:
I hope you're going to enjoy the battleships. They're going to be beautiful.
and this from 2020 at Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin:
The ships that they were building, they looked terrible. I changed designs. I looked at it. I said, “That’s a terrible-looking ship. Let’s make it beautiful. It’ll cost you the same, and maybe less.” You know, sometimes, you can make it look great for less money. I said, “This is not a good-looking ship. Let’s change the design of it.”
Contrast those quotes with those of Mark T. Esper, who served as the 27th United States Secretary of Defense from 2019 to 2020. A member of the Republican Party, he had previously served as the 23rd U.S. Secretary of the Army from November 2017 to July 2019:
Mark Esper said Trump griped on “multiple occasions” about how the US Navy ships looked.
Esper said Trump called the US fleet “ugly,” and compared its vessels to Russian and Italian ships.
Esper said he told Trump that US ships are “built to fight and win, not win beauty contests.”
SOURCE: businessinsider.com
You know where I’m going with this. Trump has merged his beauty-contest fixation with military hardware, which, by necessity, is a leading example of the maxim “form follows function.”
Ooh-ooh! I’ve got an idea!
Upon viewing a short segment of Trump’s Golden Fleet announcement, I knew immediately what my cartoon take would be. However, I was sure that many other cartoonists would pounce on the idea before I had a chance to carry out the task. To my surprise, I found nothing online that parodied the famous Battleship game.
My inner Trump jumped on the “big is better” idea, so I focused on an oversized game piece, the biggest battleship ever seen in the history of tabletop games. It’s so huuuuge that I forgot to put pegs in the ship’s holes to illustrate where Xi had already made hits. Cartoonists take a lot of liberties with visual accuracy, whether intentional or not, and this was one of them.
Nevertheless, sunk without a shot
Multiple reliable sources have stated that Trump’s proposal will never be realized.
You can take this one to the bank. The Navy will spend tens of billions of dollars over the course of the next decade on the Trump-class program. At best, the Navy will receive three troublesome ships that will cost more than $10 billion each before then entire scheme is abandoned.
SOURCE: Reliable Statecraft
So, in a sense, without firing a shot, Xi is correct. Trump’s battleship is sunk.