08/21/2026
This is an outrageous decision. Doris Miller stepped up when he didn’t have to, manning an anti-aircraft weapon for which he was never trained, to shoot down enemy aircraft attacking Battle Ship Row in Pearl Harbor. When his own ship sank, he rescued his wounded ship mates. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions, the only enlisted man to have been so honored. Doris Miller’s name represents the very best of the United States Navy, and demands respect and recognition as one of the most deserving sailors in the history of the Service.
The Navy is Erasing Black Pearl Harbor Hero Doris Miller to Honor Private Bonespurs (Until He’s Gone)
Somewhere in the Pentagon, a warship under construction has quietly lost its name. Not on paper, not officially, not yet. But internally, among the people building it, the future USS Doris Miller is no longer called the USS Doris Miller. It is called CVN-81. Just a hull number. Three sources familiar with internal Navy discussions tell CNN that the Navy is working to rename the aircraft carrier once meant to honor a Black Pearl Harbor hero, and that among the names under consideration is Donald Trump's own.
Call this what it actually is: unadulterated racism, wrapped in bureaucratic arrogance. It is part of a deliberate, systematic effort to scrub Black history and minority heroes from the public square. Strip away the institutional doubletalk, and the motive is unmistakable. A regime that cannot tolerate the memory of a Black enlisted man receiving the Navy's highest honors would rather carve his name off a capital ship and stencil a politician's on the hull instead.
The story of how the ship got its name in the first place makes the insult even sharper. In January 2020, during Trump's first term, then Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly stood at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day ceremony in Pearl Harbor and announced that a new Ford class carrier would bear the name of Doris Miller, a mess attendant who picked up a machine gun he had never been trained to use and fought back as Japanese bombers tore through the fleet. Miller was the son of a sharecropper, Modly said that day, and he wore the same uniform every sailor wears, regardless of race.
Six years later, that promise appears to be quietly unraveling. The effort to rename the ship has reportedly been underway since earlier this year. A recent White House executive order on shipbuilding referred to the vessel only by its hull number, tasking military leadership with replacing its launch systems, and never once used the name Doris Miller. The Navy is under pressure to settle the matter before the ship's keel laying ceremony at the end of this year, even though delivery is not expected until 2034.
Beyond the sheer, horrific malice of stripping Miller's legacy, the decision exposes the absolute lie at the heart of this administration's rhetoric. This is a regime that constantly screams about "waste, fraud, and abuse" while engineering a staggering, multi-million-dollar administrative and logistical waste of taxpayers' money. Rebranding a supercarrier mid-production, retooling documentation, altering commemorative assets, and managing the fallout is a massive sinkhole for time and public funds.
Worse yet, it is a double tax on the American public. There is zero chance a decision this ugly stands over the long haul. The moment sanity returns to the executive branch, public outrage and legal challenges will force the Navy to restore Miller's name. That means taxpayers will pay twice: once now to satisfy a fragile, racist ego, and again later to fix the damage and put Doris Miller's name back where it belongs.
What the Navy is reportedly offering in exchange is smaller consolation. One source says a different warship would carry Miller's name instead, and that the Navy is recommending him, at long last, for the Medal of Honor. That recommendation still requires congressional authorization and the president's own approval. Miller's great nephew, Thomas Bledsoe, says the family was never told any of this was happening. He called the Medal of Honor push a positive step. He did not sound like a man who trusted the rest of it.
It is worth sitting with exactly what Doris Miller did to earn a warship's name. He was belowdecks doing laundry duty, one of the only jobs the Navy allowed Black sailors to hold, when the first torpedo hit. He helped carry his mortally wounded captain to safety.
Then he took control of an anti aircraft gun with no training whatsoever and kept firing until he ran out of am******on and the ship began to sink beneath him. He stayed to help other sailors escape before he swam for shore himself. He received the Navy Cross from Admiral Chester Nimitz, became the first Black serviceman sent on a war bond tour alongside white sailors, and was killed a year later when a Japanese torpedo hit his ship at the Battle of Makin. He never came home to see any of it.
This did not happen in isolation. The Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent the past year systematically unwinding names it associates with diversity and inclusion. The USNS Harvey Milk, honoring the Navy veteran and gay rights activist, was renamed on Hegseth's direct order.
Confederate era Army base names were quietly restored by finding other soldiers who happened to share the same surnames as the original Confederate honorees, a bureaucratic sleight of hand that let the administration claim compliance with the law while returning the names to the wall.
A Navy renaming commission convened last year under former Secretary John Phelan, who reportedly believed carriers should only be named for presidents, admirals, or consequential battles. He left office before that review was finished.
Doris Miller was neither a president nor an admiral. He was a mess attendant who refused to die quietly. No aircraft carrier has ever been named for a sitting president. The carriers that do carry presidential names, the Lincoln, the Reagan, the two Bushes, were all christened for men who had already left office, often long dead. The ones that broke that mold did so for merit instead of title.
The Nimitz for the admiral who commanded the Pacific Fleet. The Carl Vinson for the congressman who built the modern Navy from a committee chair. Doris Miller would have been the first enlisted sailor and the first African American to receive that honor. That would still be true today, if the honor survives.
This is not the only place the president has recently inserted himself into the ship's design. Weeks ago, Trump ordered the Navy to rip out the carrier's modern electromagnetic launch system, a piece of technology nearly half built by General Atomics under a billion dollar contract, and replace it with steam catapults the Navy retired generations ago. Naval experts called the reversal costly, technically baffling, and almost certainly a multibillion dollar, multiyear setback. The justification offered was aesthetic as much as strategic. The president prefers how the old systems looked.
What ties the catapults to the name is the same toxic instinct running underneath both decisions. It is not really about steam versus electromagnetics, and it is not really about which name looks better stenciled on a hull. It is about whose judgment gets to override an institution's own settled decisions, and whose memory is disposable the moment it stops being useful.
Doris Miller cannot lobby for himself. He cannot hold a press conference or threaten a primary challenger. He is only a photograph, a plaque, and a promise made on a stage years ago that nobody currently in power feels bound to keep. Representative Jason Crow put it plainly when he learned of the reported switch, noting that Miller earned his place through wartime sacrifice while the man potentially replacing him avoided serving at all. The Pentagon has not confirmed anything yet. It has also not denied it.
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