What did Donald Trump do today?

He named a new class of ship after the only person he's ever named anything after.

Trump announced today that the Navy would purchase a new kind of proposed warship, named to honor Trump himself. He declared it "one hundred times more powerful" than any previous battleship. In reality, it's not a battleship at all, and the initial design has attracted scorn for its lack of power. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal makes clear that Trump's vision for the "Trump-class" ship is driven by what he thinks looks good: a "cool-looking ship" with forward-facing gun turrets, as one expert derisively put it.  

This is the actual concept art released by the White House.

Trump, who dodged the Vietnam draft and neglected to enlist in the Navy when he first became eligible to do so 62 years ago, has all kinds of opinions about Navy ships. For example, he wants to tear out the launch systems on modern aircraft carriers and replace them with 50-year-old models they replaced because he believes magnetic launch systems don't work when wet. He's also been distressed by visible rust on Navy ships, calling them "terrible looking." (Rust is completely inevitable even on very new ships, and not in and of itself a sign of decay or poor maintenance.)

Even if designers ignore Trump's artistic touches in favor of things that would actually make them useful as military vessels, they'd still be a poor match against their most likely combat adversary, China, according to the experts quoted in the WSJ article.

As for why the Navy and defense contractors would build such a tactically useless ship, the likely answer is that they have no intention of doing so—or of keeping the "Trump-class" name in the face of what is sure to be massive opposition inside and outside of the military. But while Trump will have no power to insist on "cool-looking" guns over functional ones when ships are actually built in the coming decade, his support today might help secure the massive amount of funding needed for a new ship class.

It's becoming difficult to keep track of the number of things Trump has tried to slap his name and personal brand on during his second term: a dubious new kind of savings account, a pay-to-skip the line version of a permanent residency card, the Kennedy Center, and—apparently without any sense of irony—both a new warship and the United States Institute for Peace. 

Why does this matter?

• There are lots of words for this kind of behavior—megalomania, narcissism, attention-seeking behavior—and none of them refer to someone with stable mental health.  

• The purpose of the United States Navy isn't to make Donald Trump feel like he's useful or popular.

• It's dangerous and sad when a president can be this easily manipulated.