MAGA Takes Aim at Navy Sailors

As the USS Abraham Lincoln completes a record stint at sea, the Navy’s sacrifice isn't enough for Trump or his base

The sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln deserve better than mockery from people sitting comfortably behind keyboards. The carrier has now been deployed for roughly nine months and has spent more than 240 consecutive days at sea without a port call — an extraordinary, record-setting stretch even by nuclear-powered aircraft carrier standards. Yet check in on military and veteran Facebook groups or scroll through X and you will find a never-ending chorus of MAGA critics — and maybe some Russian and Iranian bots, by the looks of some of the accounts — blaming the sailors themselves for struggling with the conditions aboard ship.

“USS Lincoln crew: Suck it up,” one Facebook post read. “This is the job,” scolded a former Marine in a social media video. Afghanistan veteran Joey Jones joined Fox News to go on an extended rant against sailors who are complaining. “How weak are you!” he exclaimed.

But what do you expect? The MAGA movement was built on the unrelenting belief that Trump can do no wrong, and nothing is going to stop the president’s most faithful followers from defending him — not even the troops or our Navy. 

I served aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt during a deployment in which we spent 159 consecutive days at sea during Operation Enduring Freedom. It was pure hell. There is no romantic, recruiting-commercial version of month after month on an aircraft carrier. You work, eat, sleep, and live inside a steel city that never stops moving. The days all blend into one. Privacy barely exists. Sleep is interrupted. Equipment breaks. Food gets repetitive and scarce. Tempers shorten. The smallest comforts begin to matter enormously.  And when there is no port call on the horizon, the ship can start to feel less like a powerful symbol of American freedom and more like a prison with a flight deck. People do jump off the ship; I’ve seen it. In fact, even on shorter cruises and training exercises at sea, we have lost sailors at sea to suicide.

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This does not make sailors weak. It makes them human beings. 

We used to all agree in this country that the mental health and welfare of our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Airmen and Guardians was paramount to party or politics. It was until Donald Trump came along. 

The president’s response to reports about the conditions aboard the Lincoln was to say the sailors had not been at sea “nearly long enough.” This is easy to say from a Washington snack cart. It’s much harder to say after months of watches, flight operations, maintenance, missed holidays, and separation from children and spouses. The problems of those deployed don’t pause when they leave, either. They compound and get worse over time. 

Military leadership is supposed to understand this. But when you replace military leadership with cable news hosts and reality TV show stars, what is supposed to be understanding turns to resentment, and MAGA is along for the ride. 

The same disconnect is visible in Trump’s order to move future Gerald Ford-class carriers from the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, back to steam catapults. Trump has spent years portraying steam as the simple, rugged answer to an overly complicated new technology. EMALS absolutely had serious developmental and reliability problems. That history should not be rewritten. But neither should the history of steam catapults.

Steam is not magic. It is manpower-intensive, maintenance-intensive infrastructure. Navy sources have noted that traditional steam catapults consume roughly 125 gallons of fresh water per launch. They depend on extensive piping, valves, maintenance, and trained sailors to keep them operating. There isn’t enough space here to get into specifics of all the pitfalls of steam catapults, but they do go down and are incredibly hard to maintain.

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The USS Gerald Ford was deliberately designed as an all-electric ship in part to eliminate steam service lines, reduce maintenance, improve corrosion control, and reduce manning requirements the Navy struggles to fill each year. You cannot simply order the Navy to go back to steam as though someone were changing a setting on a dashboard.

Which is why it won’t happen. Leadership in the Navy will slow-roll Trump and wait him out of office. The change is too costly now and ultimately would be like turning around the Titanic. Which I’m sure Trump was told, but that wouldn’t stop him from further hampering the operational capability of the Navy. 

Which leads us to why exactly the USS Abraham Lincoln was in this position in the first place. Iran drone attacks seriously hampered the operation of Naval Support Activity Bahrain — the primary U.S. Navy logistics hub in the region. Therefore supplies were delayed, and sailors went without on the Abraham Lincoln. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may have tried to cover it up.

The sailors aboard Abraham Lincoln have done what their country asked of them. They have stayed on station. They have kept aircraft flying. They have carried out the mission through a deployment few Americans can truly comprehend. Their families rightfully exposed the peril these young men and women were in at sea. 

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Trump and his supporters responded in the only way they know how: turning what was once a sacred American norm of “supporting the troops” into political theater. 

There isn’t much left of the old way of American reverence of the military or the politics that surrounds it — and that is exactly what they want.