Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent got into a white-hot shouting match in a West Wing hall, within earshot of Trump and his guest, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy. The fight started about their different opinions on who should lead the IRS, but then spilled over into the efficiency of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s team.

“Bessent criticised Musk for overpromising and underdelivering budget cuts with DOGE,” Axios’ Marc Caputo reported. “Musk clapped back by calling Bessent a ‘Soros agent’ and accusing him of having run ‘a failed hedge fund’.”

Musk also had a nasty spat with Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, earlier this month over Teslas and tariffs. Musk posted on his social platform X that “Navarro is dumber than a sack of bricks”.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, dismissed that hair-pulling incident, saying: “Boys will be boys.”

There was once a fear that women would be too emotional at the top, but look at Musk. He maniacally jumps around the stage, and he is known to mist up in the middle of interviews about his work and his love life.

And if you don’t want an unstable creature at the top, particularly at that bastion of masculinity, the Pentagon, why would you hire Pete Hegseth?

The lightweight former Fox weekend anchor, who promised to forgo his louche ways, made dunderheaded blunders with Signal that could have jeopardised American troops, and invited a nest of vipers into the Defence Department. (He even ordered up a spiffy make-up studio next to the Pentagon briefing room, as CBS reported.)

Hegseth followed his boss’s reality-TV show lead and produced the Real Housewives of the Pentagon, casting fellow military veterans as top advisers, even if none of these men had the requisite experience to run a sprawling, global organisation, and they had no interest in learning. Instead, they lit up the Pentagon with bawdy meetings, vicious rivalries and power feuds. The bad-mouthing led to three firings and, on Thursday, the abrupt departure of Hegseth’s chief of staff.

Having his wife, Jennifer, a former Fox producer, by his side at the Pentagon, where she is known as the “human leash”, has not kept Hesgeth on the straight and narrow.

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Hapless Hegseth fought back by accusing reporters of publishing “hoaxes” and using “disgruntled former employees” to smear him.

But the man in charge of a department with a budget of about $US850 billion ($1.32 trillion) seems flighty and shaky, unable to find loyal consiglieres and unable to stick to the Pentagon’s classified message system, which is among the best in the world for a reason: It protects US troops.

When General Jim Mattis was Trump’s defence secretary in the first term, he conveyed the idea that he was the adult who would make sure the highchair king in the Oval Office did not do anything crazy with the military. But who is the adult now?

Trump, who often casts by looks, may have liked Hegseth’s slick style and pretty face. But even the Emperor of Chaos must realise this Princess of Chaos has to go.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.