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Reports that fists almost flew between two members of President Donald Trump’s crack finance team are hardly reassuring with the economy perched on the precipice of a jobs slump and a possible deeper slowdown.
But the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened to punch Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Bill Pulte in the face at an exclusive MAGA club last week is a sensational morsel of Beltway gossip.
The spur for the near-fisticuffs was Bessent’s belief that Pulte had bad-mouthed him to the big boss, two sources familiar with the evening told CNN. The White House declined to comment. CNN has reached out to the offices of the alleged potential pugilists.
Bessent’s combativeness — he allegedly told Pulte he wanted to “take the matter outside” — might draw quips about the first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and the most notorious duel in American history.
But it offers two worrying insights into tensions inside Trump’s brain trust at a pivotal moment.
The true currency of Trump world
Most presidents would recoil in horror at reports of senior aides on the verge of a brawl. Former President Barack Obama used to talk of his Lincoln-style team of rivals. But it’s hard to imagine his cerebral Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner throwing down the gauntlet to a Cabinet colleague during the Great Recession in 2009.
Trump, being Trump, might welcome the friction, seeing in it a chance to play his warring lieutenants against one another to his advantage.
But there’s a graver reason why a cocktail hour brouhaha in Georgetown will send alarm bells around the world.
The alleged shouting match reveals there’s only one currency in MAGA world: uber loyalty to Trump. Bessent was apparently furious because he thought his colleague had been talking about him with Trump behind his back. The Treasury secretary has emerged as an impressive inside player in the bruising Washington game and knows that his capacity to do his job — calming the markets, shaping the president’s wildest instincts and stabilizing the global economy — requires Trump’s absolute confidence. Once Trump turns against someone, it’s a tough road back. If Bessent starts to sense he’s on the outs, investors might panic.
It’s obvious that the first duty of Trump’s officials is to cater to his self-image of greatness rather than to the public. Hence the fawning North Korea-style genuflections that Trump requires in Cabinet meetings.
But flattery exacts a price. Trump’s team must tell him what he wants to hear — not what he should hear. Such self-censoring is always dangerous for presidents, who live inside bubbles of deference even in normal times.
It’s even more hazardous under Trump, since the president is embarked on the riskiest, most unorthodox economic experiment in generations. His tariff wars have ripped up a global trading system that made the US the world’s mightiest economic power. Now, Trump wants to crush another cornerstone of US financial superiority: the independence of the Federal Reserve.
He’s not just pursuing another long-term obsession — scything interest rates. He could also get his hands on the Fed’s other levers, like regulating banks and bailouts, in a way that could profit him and his rich friends in the event of a major financial shock.
While Trump is bolstering his appeal to his base by threatening to send troops into Chicago and cranking up the pace of his mass deportation drive, most Americans want him to do something else — fix the economy. A CBS News poll published last week showed that just 36% of voters think the economy is good. Some 64% think prices have been going up in recent weeks and 56% think the economy is getting worse. In a new NBC News survey, Trump’s approval is weakening on vital economic issues. Only 39% approve of his handling of inflation and 41% back his handling of trade and tariffs. He’s down to his most loyal base on the economy and has pushed away independents and more moderate crossover voters who helped send him back to the White House.
Cardiff Garcia, the editorial director of the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization, told CNN’s Audie Cornish on Monday that workers were becoming more pessimistic about the economy and Trump’s tariff strategy.
“They’re most worried about the same things that they actually were worried about during the Biden administration, which is the cost of basic goods and services and the cost of housing. They really wish that the administration and the Congress would focus on that instead,” he said. “Tariffs actually ranked dead last as what workers think that the president should be prioritizing right now.”
The economy is on a knife’s edge. The data is turning bad. And two top members of the president’s team almost came to blows.
