{"id":3040,"date":"2026-08-23T04:21:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T04:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=3040"},"modified":"2026-08-23T04:21:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T04:21:02","slug":"maga-attacks-navy-sailors-over-uss-abraham-lincoln-complaints","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/?p=3040","title":{"rendered":"MAGA Attacks Navy Sailors Over USS Abraham Lincoln Complaints"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tThe sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln<\/a><\/em> deserve better than mockery from people sitting comfortably behind keyboards. <\/a>The carrier has now been deployed for roughly nine months<\/a> and has spent more than 240 consecutive days at sea without a port call \u2014 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 \u2014 and maybe some Russian and Iranian bots, by the looks of some of the accounts \u2014\u00a0blaming the sailors themselves for struggling with the conditions aboard ship.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cUSS Lincoln<\/em> crew: Suck it up,\u201d one Facebook post<\/a> read. \u201cThis is the job,\u201d scolded a former Marine in a social media video<\/a>. Afghanistan veteran Joey Jones joined Fox News to go on an extended rant<\/a> against sailors who are complaining. \u201cHow weak are you!\u201d he exclaimed.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut 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\u2019s most faithful followers from defending him \u2014\u00a0not even the troops or our Navy<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI served aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt<\/em> 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.\u00a0 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\u2019ve seen it. In fact, even on shorter cruises and training exercises at sea, we have lost sailors at sea to suicide.<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tThis does not make sailors weak. It makes them human beings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWe 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<\/a> came along.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe president\u2019s response<\/a> to reports about the conditions aboard the Lincoln<\/em> was to say the sailors had not been at sea \u201cnearly long enough.\u201d This is easy to say from a Washington snack cart. It\u2019s 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\u2019t pause when they leave, either. They compound and get worse over time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMilitary 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe same disconnect is visible in Trump\u2019s order<\/a> to move future Gerald Ford<\/em>-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.<\/p>\n

\n\tSteam is not magic. It is manpower-intensive, maintenance-intensive infrastructure. Navy sources have noted that traditional steam catapults consume <\/a>roughly 125 gallons<\/a> of fresh water per launch. They depend on extensive piping, valves, maintenance, and trained sailors to keep them operating. There isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tThe USS Gerald Ford<\/em> was deliberately designed as an all-electric ship in part to eliminate steam service lines, reduce maintenance, improve corrosion control, and reduce <\/a>manning requirements<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich is why it won\u2019t 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<\/em>. Which I\u2019m sure Trump was told, but that wouldn\u2019t stop him from further hampering the operational capability of the Navy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich leads us to why exactly the USS Abraham Lincoln<\/em> was in this position in the first place. Iran drone attacks seriously hampered the operation of Naval Support Activity Bahrain \u2014 the primary U.S. Navy logistics hub in the region. Therefore supplies were delayed, and sailors went without on the Abraham<\/em> Lincoln<\/em>. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth<\/a> may have tried to cover it up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe sailors aboard Abraham Lincoln<\/em> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tTrump and his supporters responded in the only way they know how: turning what was once a sacred American norm of \u201csupporting the troops\u201d into political theater.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThere isn\u2019t much left of the old way of American reverence of the military or the politics that surrounds it \u2014 and that is exactly what they want.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2014 an extraordinary, record-setting stretch even by nuclear-powered aircraft carrier standards. Yet check in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[4215,119,3518,4216,3480,4138,4217,4214],"class_list":["post-3040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-abraham","tag-attacks","tag-complaints","tag-lincoln","tag-maga","tag-navy","tag-sailors","tag-uss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valutednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}