President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Navy was ousted on Wednesday, leaving a witch-fearing MAGA diehard in charge as the war with Iran hits a new phase.
The Pentagon announced that Hung Cao will serve as acting Navy secretary after John Phelan departed “effective immediately.”
While Cao, unlike Phelan, has a military service background, he became known in political circles as a MAGA Senate candidate in Virginia in the 2024 election, where he lost to Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. Previously, the retired Navy captain also ran for the House in 2022.
During the campaign cycle, Cao, a 54-year-old Vietnamese refugee who moved to Virginia as a child, turned heads with a series of bizarre interviews and unhinged claims as he campaigned in the deep purple state where he lost in 2024 by eight points.
“There’s a place in Monterey, California called Lover’s Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point. Now it’s become, they took out the Christ. It’s Lover’s Point. And it’s really, Monterrey is a dark place now, a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over there,” Cao said.
His comments came in a 2023 interview with Sean Feucht, a far-right pastor who railed against COVID restrictions and wokeness.
“We can’t let that happen to Virginia,” Cao warned. “Virginia, I mean, especially down in Roanoke, they’re gun-loving people. Richmond, too, and in Virginia Beach, and we just need to mobilize Christians across the nation.”
At another point in that same interview, Cao claimed he was African American. Feucht was singing his praises, “you’re conservative, and you love God, and you love America, like all the things—”
“And I’m African American because I grew up in Africa too,” Cao chimed in with a laugh.
He spent some time in Niger as a boy because his father worked for the now-shuttered USAID after the family came to the U.S. in 1975.
Meanwhile, in another interview with MAGA architect Steve Bannon, Cao joked about wearing a KKK hood.
“I know I’ll be attacked by the left, and call me a white supremacist, but I have one ask for them, it’s just when you give me my hood, make sure it’s got the little slits and not the circles, so I can see better,” he told Bannon.
Later in the 2024 campaign season, at a debate right before the election, Cao gave a strange response invoking cannibalism when asked to explain one of his social media posts criticizing DEI in military recruitment.
“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” said Cao. “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 young men and women that are going to win wars.”
In 2022, as the debate about abortion was top of mind with the landmark Supreme Court decision ending abortion rights nationwide, Cao compared abortion, while attacking a bill by Democrats in California meant to protect women from being prosecuted for miscarriages, to the atrocities carried out in the Holocaust.
“The Nazis did this. They take Jewish babies and just take the legs and just smash the babies and kill them. You think that can’t happen in this country?” he said, according to a report in the Washington Post.
Despite Cao’s series of controversial claims, he was confirmed as undersecretary of the Navy last October by the Senate in a vote that broke along party lines.
The Daily Beast asked the Navy for comment.
In his first message to service members, Cao looked to reassure them, writing, “I want to assure you that our mission remains absolute and unchanged.”
He said in the memo that he was “deeply honored to step into the role.”
