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Trump’s Loose Grip on Reality Could Sink the Navy’s Ships

The dire conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln are due to a president’s being dangerously detached from what’s actually happening in the world.

Donald Trump waves to the press after landing at the Ellipse near the White House on August 16, 2026.

In July, a parent whose son was serving on the Navy ship USS Abraham Lincoln wrote an alarmed letter to Stars and Stripes, expressing worry that the dire conditions being reported from aboard the ship were harming sailors. The Abraham Lincoln has been deployed in the Middle East since last November and has seen combat in the Iran War. It was scheduled to return home in May, but its mission has been indefinitely extended. “My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to,” the letter read. The writer added, “Our loved ones are out there fighting with no understanding as to what they’re defending.”

The anxiety expressed in that letter was well grounded. Since then, reports from two publications that are well sourced with the Pentagon—Stars and Stripes and The Navy Times—have made clear that there have been multiple suicide attempts aboard the Lincoln. While the Navy denies that there is a widespread mental health crisis on the Lincoln, the families of sailors, as well as political leaders, have begun to loudly decry the distressing conditions aboard the ship.

On August 8, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao, complaining, “There have been widespread reports of shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing issues, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and disruptions in the mail system, which have caused many care packages in route to the ship to be lost in transit for months.”

The roots of the critical situation aboard the Lincoln go back to poor military planning by Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth in the run-up to the Iran disaster. They had assumed that overwhelming US airpower would lead to a quick victory, comparable to the coup the US was able to pull off in Venezuela in January. This scenario radically underestimated the resilience and capability of the Iranian government.

As The New York Times reports,

The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln’s supply problems began soon after the first day of the war, as Iranian missiles and attack drones fell on a Navy base in Bahrain. The Iranian attack, retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran,........

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