Donald Trump bragged that his administration would recruit “only the best people.” Instead, his regime is the very definition of a kakistocracy, a system of government run by the least qualified, most unprincipled, or worst citizens.
Trump’s unhinged Attorney General, Pam Bondi, or his dog-killing cosplaying DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem, as well as his Fox TV host, with white supremacist tattoos and a history of public drunkenness, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, are obvious examples of the least qualified, most unprincipled, or worst citizens running the regime. The list of kakistocrats in the Trump regime is long, and would be comical if his gang of incompetents weren’t individually and collectively doing so much damage to this nation and the world.
Given the deep and vast well of total ineptitude in the regime, many of the more garden-variety government agency bunglers don’t receive the attention they deserve. One good example is Trump’s Navy Secretary, John Phelan.
The Navy Secretary is a civilian position in accordance with the Constitutional mandate that civilian government has the responsibility to control the military. The secretary is not required to have any Navy experience or even any military background, although most do. Phelan has no military background whatsoever. He is the first person in more than 15 years to serve as the Secretary of the Navy without any prior military experience.
Carlos Del Toro, who preceded Phelan in the Biden administration, is an example of the Navy Secretary that we need. The contrast between the two men could not be more stark. Del Toro served in the United States Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer for 22 years, retiring with the rank of commander. During his service, Del Toro served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and as a special assistant to the director and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Trump is now threatening to launch a regional, if not a global, war. He has ordered two US Navy carrier strike groups, led by the two super-carriers, the USS Gerald R Ford and the USS Abraham Lincoln, to steam towards Iran, supported by long-range bombers, missiles, and drones in what appears to be another distraction from the mounting evidence of his central role in facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s international pedophile ring.
In times such as these, having a Navy Secretary who knows what he is doing would be a good thing. Then again, it would probably not be enough to stop the mad king. During the first Trump administration, a cadre of experienced professionals failed to keep Trump under control. Kelly, McMaster, Mattis, and Miley were unable to keep Trump from violating the law and the Constitution.
Why was Phelan chosen to be Navy Secretary? His primary qualification appears to be that he handed Trump $12 million in campaign donations.
Big donors to presidential campaigns are often rewarded with cabinet positions or ambassadorships. Trump, however, has taken pay-to-play to record levels. Donald Trump has assembled the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history, with at least 13 billionaires set to take on government posts. Phelan is a member of Trump’s billionaire boys’ and girls’ club. Phelan made his fortune as co-managing partner of MSD Capital, which managed investments for computer billionaire Michael Dell. He later went on to co-found the hedge fund, Rugger Management.
Even if the would-be mad king can be stopped from starting a pointless war, the US Navy is facing serious challenges and needs competent leadership. Despite being the most powerful naval force in the world, the US Navy simply can’t build warships anymore. While nearly doubling its shipbuilding budget over the last two decades, the number of ships in the US Navy has been shrinking. At the same time, 82% of Navy ship construction projects are behind schedule and over budget.
Unfortunately for Phalen, he will be working with a president who claims to be an expert on nearly everything, including ship design. Trump has announced the building of “Trump-class battleships. “The new battleship that we have, which I’ve seen and helped design, I put a little more spirit in the hull, a little bit more, give me a little bit more hull, I want that ship to look gorgeous,” he said.
“I am a very aesthetic person,” he said, as an explanation for why he would be weighing in on the design of the new Navy battleships.
Trump claims that the new battleships will be “the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built, the largest battleship in the history of the world,” suggesting that Trump knows very little about naval ships or that he doesn’t care about the accuracy of his boasts.
During the press conference announcing the battleship project, Trump as much as admitted that the battleships were primarily a distraction from his ongoing Epstein file scandal.
Of course, all Trump’s Navy Secretary, John Phelan, can do is to repeat the gibberish spewed by his deranged boss. This is where an experienced Navy Secretary who actually knows something about ships might prove valuable to his country.
In addition to the strategic and technical challenges, John Phelan will also have to address the administrative and managerial aspects of the world’s largest navy. For more than the last 30 years, the Navy has struggled with the Fat Leonard corruption scandal, often described as “perhaps the worst national-security breach of its kind to hit the Navy since the end of the Cold War.” Then again, given the blatant corruption of the Trump regime, Phelan may be asked to promote the grift rather than shut it down.
Phelan does have much in common with others in the Trump regime, beyond his billions. He also had ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein files show that Phalen flew on Epstein’s private plane at least twicw on flights from New York to London. Also on board the plane, in addition to Epstein, was Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and Epstein associate accused of procuring underage girls for him. Brunel was facing charges of sexual assault and rape of a minor when he was found dead in his Paris prison cell in 2022.
Phelan claims that these were the only times that he met Jeffrey Epstein. On the other hand, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick also claimed he cut ties with Epstein in 2005, then admitted this week that he and his family visited Epstein’s island in 2012 after documents from the files revealed the subsequent meeting.
Jeffrey Epstein and John Phelan appear to have similar tastes in art. Epstein was known for the sexually explicit paintings and photography hanging on the walls of his various homes. Likewise, Phelan is well-known as a collector of highly explicit art.
On the walls of the Park Avenue apartment Phelan shares with his wife Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, was displayed what Amy described to W Magazine as her “double dildo” photo—a blurred but still unmistakable pornographic image by Thomas Ruff of two women lying on their backs, legs raised, sharing a double-ended dildo. The decor has caused some whispering from her more conservative neighbors, but Phelan enjoys stirring the pot, the magazine reported in a 2008 article titled “Bring It On.”
In the entrance hall is an R. Luke DuBois video piece displaying 50 years of Playboy centerfolds. Just outside the door to Amy’s daughter’s bedroom are two Helmut Newton nudes, and two porn stills by Jeff Burton hang in the master bedroom next to large, posed photographs of Amy and John.
Seth Hettena, writing in The After-Action Report, notes that Phelan, as Navy Secretary, is now responsible for fixing a service with a serious sexual assault problem—more than 2,000 reported assaults in fiscal 2024 alone. That means overseeing prevention programs, implementing the military justice reforms that finally took sexual assault prosecutions out of the chain of command, and somehow convincing 340,000 active-duty personnel that this time the Navy is serious about changing the culture.
To pull it off, you need more than management skills. You need moral authority. Phelan walked into the job already carrying baggage: a home decorated with pornographic art and a seat on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. That’s not credibility that inspires confidence in reform.