President Donald Trump on Friday dismissed concerns from families of service members about the grim conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose deployment had been overextended in the Middle East due to the Iran war.
In interviews with NBC News and other outlets, family members of some of the thousands of people aboard the ship have described a lack of supplies and food and an overall deteriorating mental health situation with multiple sailors having attempted to jump overboard.
NBC News asked Trump, who was speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews, whether the deployments have gone on for too long and whether he’s worried about troops’ mental health.
“No. No. No — not nearly long enough,” Trump said.
Danielle Rappa, whose son has been deployed on the ship, told NBC News that the situation was like a “scene out of the ‘American Horror Story,’ where … everybody’s dead, but they don’t know it yet.” She said that she had noticed a change in his mood as his deployment dragged on. “Where he had been very positive, he started getting very dark,” she said.
Trump also told reporters Friday that the Lincoln is “moving right now or very shortly” and that “it’s being replaced with another very similar ship.” The USS George Washington is expected to replace the Lincoln in the Middle East, a U.S. official told NBC News.
Melanie Stowe, whose daughter is serving aboard the Lincoln, said that the “deployment date keeps getting moved up, and then it gets moved back, and it gets moved up.”
Both Stowe and Rappa said their children have told them about a fellow sailor jumping overboard. A U.S. official said Thursday that a sailor assigned to the Lincoln’s air wing went overboard in early August and was quickly rescued and treated. That sailor was transferred off the ship for further medical care, the official said.
U.S. military leaders have been privately raising concerns inside the Pentagon and the White House about low morale and widespread fatigue among American service members who’ve been deployed for months to support the war with Iran, two U.S. officials said.
More than 50,000 troops have been deployed to support the U.S.- and Israel-led war with Iran.
A typical deployment for a carrier is roughly six to seven months and includes regular stops at ports to refresh and replenish food supplies. Aboard the Lincoln, the circumstances for the 5,000 sailors and Marines have become particularly troubling, according to U.S. officials.
The last port visit was in Guam in December — the vessel has been at sea for 244 consecutive days.
Fewer stops at ports have led to a limited amount of supplies and fresh food on the ships, and service members and their families have pointed to these worsening living conditions aboard the Lincoln.
A U.S. official said Thursday that the “Lincoln is operating in a highly contested environment where traditional supply hubs in the Middle East were disrupted by combat actions. In response, leadership prioritized mission-critical supplies: first food, then hygiene items, then mail. Current reports from the ship confirm continuous access to clean water, functional AC and healthy meal options.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Thursday that the reports are being “completely misrepresented.”
“We make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” he said aboard the USS Gridley in Panama. “Some deployments are longer than others, and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody.”
It could take several weeks for the replacement of the Lincoln by the George Washington to be complete. It will likely take at least two weeks for the Lincoln to return to its home base of San Diego.
Several Democratic lawmakers are demanding that the Trump administration provide answers about these extended deployments.
In a letter Wednesday to Hegseth and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said reports about the conditions aboard the Lincoln “warrant immediate attention” and raise the question of “whether the Navy can sustain the operational tempo now being demanded of its carrier force.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Iraq War, said on X that the Navy must allow a bipartisan congressional delegation to visit the aircraft carrier “to conduct oversight investigation into this horrible situation.”
