Diaconis and Gamburd computed moments of secular coefficients in the CUE ensemble. We use the characteristic map to give a new combinatorial proof of their result. We also extend their computation to moments of traces of symmetric powers, where the same result holds but in a wider range. Our combinatorial proof is inspired by gcd matrices, as used by Vaughan and Wooley and by Granville and Soundararajan. We use these CUE computations to suggest a conjecture about moments of characters sums twisted by the Liouville (or by the Möbius) function, and establish a version of it in function fields. The moral of our conjecture (and its verification in function fields) is that the Steinhaus random multiplicative function is a good model for the Liouville (or for the Möbius) function twisted by a random Dirichlet character. We also evaluate moments of secular coefficients and traces of symmetric powers, without any condition on the size of the matrix. As an application we give a new formula for a matrix integral that was considered by Keating, Rodgers, Roditty-Gershon and Rudnick in their study of the $k$-fold divisor function.