Did President Donald Trump invent a fictional sailor in order to justify wasting billions of dollars to put old-fashioned technology on naval aircraft carriers?
Speaking at a campaign rally in January 2024, Trump told a story about a sailor aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier who argued on behalf of steam catapults over their more modern electromagnetic counterparts. Trump had been telling the same story since at least 2019—but this time he gave his source a name: Bill Jones.
Trump claimed that “Bill Jones” had lamented the shift to electromagnetic catapults: “They’re no good, sir. They don’t work. And if they break, we have to send to MIT to get a genius to come in and fix them. Whereas the steam, I could fix it with a hammer and a blowtorch.”
The Wall Street Journal attempted to track down the mysterious sailor who informed Trump’s directive to install old-fashioned steam catapults on aircraft carriers. The Journal contacted former Navy officials, White House aides, lawmakers, and industry executives—but no one knew anything about the sailor at the center of Trump’s story. A Navy spokesperson told the publication that without more information, they “cannot accurately locate this Sailor in our records.”
In August, Trump turned this complaint of dubious origin into real policy. The president signed a memo directing the U.S. Navy to redesign the Doris Miller, the newest Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier, and all remaining ships, to install steam catapults.
In a statement at the time, the White House claimed that steam catapults were more “resilient and robust,” and that the move would reactivate parts of the maritime industrial base that are “easier to scale.” In reality, steam catapults have been out of production for decades.
Before Trump’s directive, the Navy’s official position was that the electromagnetic launchers have allowed their Ford-class carriers to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than previous classes of ships. Additionally, the maintenance on steam catapults is considered labor intensive and costly, compared to newer models. In a late August memo, now-acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao wrote that it was not the military’s place to question Trump—but what about Bill Jones, the supposed source behind the president’s plan? By all accounts, Bill Jones doesn’t even exist.