Shitshape

By BRUCE LOWITT

A second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has been ordered to the Middle East by President Donald Trump despite warnings that the ship isn’t shipshape and, pretty soon, the crew might not be, either.

Trump, whose naval expertise is limited to playing with toy boats in his bathtubs until he was too fat to fit in one, appears to be using the Ford to pressure Iran into a new nuclear deal – and perhaps to encourage regime change there while hoping to avoid it at home.

“If this deployment works, I’ll get the American voters – and they’re all supporting me one hundred percent, even two hundred or three hundred percent – I’ll get them to forget about ICE and Minneapolis, and the you-know-who files, and the bitching about tariffs and the White House ballroom and everything else,” Trump said.

The Ford, the Navy’s newest, state-of-the-art carrier, is joining the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East “and not a minute too soon,” Trump said. “How the hell is this Lincoln, built more than a hundred and sixty years ago, going to scare Iran back to the negotiating table? What were they building aircraft carriers out of during the Civil War, wood?”

The Ford has been at sea in the Caribbean for almost eight months, a month longer than usual, along with its 4,200 crew members. An extension of the deployment like this one could not only delay necessary scheduled maintenance and repairs of the carrier and other vessels in its carrier strike group, but also could negatively impact the crew and their families, said Admiral Daryl Caudle, the Navy’s top officer.

“I’d hate to see four thousand guys, and women, too, marching on the deck of a carrier with signs like ‘Let us go home’, and ‘We’re seasick’, and ‘Fuck REDACTED’,” Caudle said.

“Oh, that’s bullshit. We have the strongest Navy in the world, both mentally and physically, and America builds the best boats in the world, better than anyone has ever built before,” Trump said, not realizing that the Navy has ships and calling them boats causes the Navy to grind its collective teeth.

“Besides,” the president added, “I’ve taken into consideration the possibility, no matter how unlikely, that the Ford could experience some, um, trouble, so I’m sending planes loaded with thousands of arm floaties and snorkels and swim fins and goggles and speedos and other shit to the carrier group, just in case.”