I’ve seen pictures on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive channel in an interview with Larry C that were apparently of the rear of the USS Ford in dock. It was completely blackened with signs of fire damage and damage from hits of some kind. That, plus this statement by Trump, leads me to believe that the ship was actually hit multiple times by most likely drones and had a significant fire lasting 30 hours. If this was the scale of the damage, there were also likely many casualties that were initially covered up by the ‘laundry fire’ story. Very likely damage to aircraft too since it seems to have affected the hangar as well.

Trump could be talking about it because the US needs to soften the reveal of the information, because this isn’t something that can be hidden for very long when the ship is sitting damaged in port in Greece.

If this is all the case, and at this point I think it is, this is a huge achievement by Iran; apart from the severe prestige damage (this is literally largest and most expensive capital warship in the world) and the loss of vital functionality for the US because they can’t bring all 11 carriers into use at the same time, in the long term this was the first of the next generation of carriers and older Nimitzes are heading for retirement, while newer ships building and commissioning normally takes around 10 years (longer for the Ford) so this creates a gap in US carrier capacity for potentially years.