In the wake of the sudden departure of Navy Secretary John Phelan, acting secretary Hung Cao steps into his place. Originally appointed to the role of undersecretary by President Donald Trump, Cao is known for his commitment to the administration’s anti-“woke” ethos, as well as a smattering of eyebrow-raising statements he’s made in the past.
Upon assuming his initial role, Cao was tasked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with modernizing base infrastructure, raising recruitment standards, and implementing culture war policies that remove DEI and vaccination requirements from throughout the military. To that end, Cao shares Hegseth’s “traditional” view on military service, once asserting, “When you're using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that's not the people we want. What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Those are the young men and women that are going to win wars.”
A rising figure in conservative politics in recent years, Cao has twice run for office, losing a House race in Virginia in 2022, then to Senator Tim Kaine in 2024. It was while on the campaign trail that Cao made some of his most attention-grabbing statements, like his assertion that a California town was being taken over by “witchcraft.”
Speaking in 2023, Cao said, “There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but…they took out the Christ. Monterey is a very dark place now. A lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”
In the same interview, Cao — who was born in Vietnam — then suggested that he was “African American” because he spent part of his childhood in Niger. Kaine went on to beat Cao by roughly 9 percent.
No reason has been given for Phelan’s departure, which comes as the U.S. is engaged in a naval blockade of Iranian ports. It has been suggested that he was ousted due to the slow production times for naval ships, but lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have expressed concern that it may have come down to questions of loyalty to the Trump project.