Sacked Navy secretary refused to leave post until Trump told him direct

Sacked Navy Secretary, John Phelan, went straight to President Donald Trump directly to ask to keep his job, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.Sources close to the publication say that Phelan spent Wednesday night in the White House waiting to see if the president, his once close friend and neighbour, would push back against his firing. However, he left empty-handed.Phelan would not concede that he had been relieved of his post until Trump confirmed it face-to-face.John Phelan is neighbours with Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, Florida (Getty)In part of a larger ongoing re-configuration of top navy positions by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Phelan was asked to resign from his position on Wednesday, amid the continued naval blockade on Iranian ports. Upon leaving, Phelan said that the role has been “the honor of my life.”According to Capitol Hill insiders, Phelan was removed from his position due to Hegseth and Trump’s belief that he is not working hard enough as Secretary of the Navy to build Trump’s “Golden Fleet”.This collection of so-called “Trump-class” battleships is an attempt to catch up to China’s rapid naval developments. The president announced the building of the USS Defiant at the end of 2025 and has claimed it will be ready in two and a half years. Hegseth and Phelan promoting the president’s ‘Trump-Class’ fleet (Getty)Per insiders, Hegseth and Trump did not believe that Phelan was pushing hard enough to secure the Pentagon’s largest-ever budget request.However, according to Mark Cancian, a retired colonel and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the president’s delivery projection is impossible. Writing for CSIS, Cancian said: “It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.”Speaking to the press about Phelan’s departure on Thursday, the president said, “[Phelan is] a hard charger and he had some conflicts with some other people, mostly as to building and buying their ships. I’m very aggressive in the new shipbuilding, and somehow he just didn’t get along with them.”Meanwhile, the USS Nimitz, the navy’s oldest functioning aircraft carrier, which was due to be decommissioned in 2026, is now being recommissioned for another year due to a delay in the delivery of the new JFK aircraft carrier. The Secretary of War has been on a firing spree across the Pentagon throughout April (Getty)Another pressure point for Phelan was his close relationship with Trump. A longtime Trump donor and friend, per insiders, he would often bypass Hegseth to speak directly to the president. According to reports, this was not something the Secretary of War would accept. Phelan was already getting iced out of top meetings, according to the WSJ, before he was asked to resign. He is being replaced by Navy Undersecretary, Hung Cao. This is not Hegseth’s first major firing. He removed Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in early April, along with Gen. David Hodne and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr. According to insiders, these firings at the beginning of April were motivated by personal paranoia over his own job. However, despite the ongoing conflict with Iran, rising gas prices, and plummeting polls, Hegseth appears to have retained the ear of the president.