Trump's new Navy secretary seems very afraid of witches and drag queens

Trump’s newly appointed Navy Secretary is raising eyebrows over his concerns that witches in California could spell double double toil and trouble.

Hung Cao, a failed Republican candidate — who ran to represent Virginia in the House in 2022 and in the Senate in 2024, and lost both times — has been named as the new acting Secretary of the Navy, the 10th person to hold that title across Trump’s five years as president, per MS NOW. Cao has filled in the position for John Phelan, who was abruptly fired on Wednesday.

His views on America’s naval might, however, are not what has drawn the most attention as Cao rises in the U.S. military ranks. Rather, he seems to have once spread the belief that a town in California has been overrun by witches, whom he said had amassed enough power to take “the Christ” out of local hotspots.

In a 2023 interview with right-wing pastor and singer-songwriter Sean Feucht, Cao claimed witches had “taken over” a city in California.

“We can’t let it turn like this,” he said, while speaking to a pastor. “There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but now it’s become — they took out the ‘Christ,’ it’s Lovers Point, and it’s really — 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.”

As if there weren’t already a masculinist streak in a comment disparaging witches, Cao also criticized the navy — often jokingly referred to as the gayest branch of the military, which data supports — for its 2023 decision to hire a drag queen, Harpy Daniels, to be a face of the navy as a “digital ambassador.”

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” said Cao, per the Daily Beast. “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.”

Witches? People ripping out their own guts? Sounds like someone just wants to be home playing with Leon S. Kennedy.

Further cementing Cao’s seemingly tenuous relationship with reality, he also seems to have previously alleged to have been “blown up” during combat while on the 2024 campaign trail. A USA Today investigation found that his history did not support such a claim.

His record “does not show a Purple Heart award, the commendation given to troops who have suffered wounds from ‘direct or indirect result of enemy action’ that required medical attention,” USA Today wrote. “Nor does his record indicate that he received the Navy’s Combat Action Ribbon, which requires that a sailor ‘must have rendered satisfactory performance under enemy fire while actively participating in ground or surface combat engagement.’”

Anyone who has watched Buffy knows that witches can put spells on people’s memory! Willow Rosenberg, you got some ’splainin to do.

This story was originally published on Them.