President Donald Trump kept his billionaire friend and neighbor John Phlelan waiting for more than an hour before breaking the news that he backed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to fire him.
Phelan and his senior aides were shocked to learn on Wednesday that the Pentagon chief was abruptly firing him in the middle of Trump’s war with Iran.
The news came via an official post on X announcing that Phelan was being replaced by Undersecretary of the Navy Hung Cao, a failed MAGA Senate candidate who has pushed bizarre theories about witchcraft and cannibalism.
Hegseth later called Phelan to ask for his resignation, prompting the billionaire investor—who had no military experience before being tapped to lead the Navy—to request a meeting with Trump, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Phelan has a home just down the street from Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, where the two regularly have dinner.
He also raised millions of dollars for Trump’s re-election campaign, and earlier this month, Phelan’s wife Amy Phelan hosted a bridal shower for Bettina Anderson, the 39-year-old fiancée of Trump’s oldest son, 48-year-old Donald Trump Jr.
That direct access to the president is reportedly part of what prompted Hegseth to fire Phelan following months of tension, with the defense secretary accusing his Navy secretary of not being a team player and ignoring the chain of command, according to the Wall Street Journal.
When Trump was finally ready to meet with Phelan on Wednesday evening, the Navy secretary asked the president to let him keep his job, but Trump refused, sources told the paper.
Hegseth and his deputy Stephen Feinberg had convinced Trump that Phelan wasn’t moving quickly enough to produce the president’s new, “golden fleet” of battleships, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The president announced in December that he was instructing the Navy to begin work on a new “Trump class battleship” called the USS Defiant that would be the “best in the world.”
“They’ll be the fastest, the biggest, and 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” he told reporters as Hegseth and Phelan stood behind him.
The plan was to initially build two ships, which Trump planned to personally help design because he’s a “very aesthetic person,” and then eventually scale up to 10 or more ships.
Phelan was instructed to deliver the ships by 2028, a timeline that was nearly impossible to meet given the U.S. shipbuilding industry’s struggles with workforce shortages, supply chain issues, and capacity limitations, according to The New York Times.
Trump told reporters that the Navy planned to get around labor shortages by “having robots helping us.”
The president confirmed on Thursday that Phelan’s firing was motivated by conflicts with senior Pentagon leadership over shipbuilding, as reported by Reuters.
“He’s a hard charger, and he had some conflicts with some other people, mostly as to building and buying new ships,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Got to get along, especially in the military, got to get along, you know. And some people liked him, some people didn’t, and that’s usually the truth about everything.”
In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Phelan said that serving as the Navy secretary was “the honor of my life.”
“Leadership at this level isn’t without its challenges,” he added. “Decision-making can be slowed by caution, competing equities, and internal friction. But our mission demands clarity, urgency, and results—and I never lost sight of that.”
Phelan is the first service secretary to be forced out of the Department of Defense this year, but Hegseth has alarmed some White House insiders by reshuffling the Pentagon’s other top leaders while the administration is at war with Iran.
Earlier this month, the Pentagon chief fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, and he has been feuding with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who is a close friend of Vice President JD Vance.
Driscoll has said he’s not resigning, and for now, the White House has reportedly told Trump he can’t fire him.
