'Knives Out' at Mar-a-Lago: Trump transition chief is reportedly 'ruffling feathers'

Donald Trump is starting to lose patience with one of his short-listers for the Treasury Department playing his allies against one another and manipulating things behind the scenes to get the role, a prominent reporter told CNN's Erin Burnett on Monday — something corroborated by other reports of Trump world behind the scenes.

Furthermore, added Marc Caputo, Trump is beginning to resent the appearance that tech billionaire Elon Musk is controlling him into making staffing decisions.

"Howard Lutnick is on Trump's shortlist to lead the Treasury Department, but The Bulwark's Marc Caputo reports tonight that he's 'shooting himself in the foot' as insiders see him as 'too competitive, too aggressive, and too thirsty for the spotlight,'" said Burnett, introducing Caputo to the audience. "All right Marc, so Lutnick, you know, he backed Trump, he was a transition leader, backed him before he won, right, so he's been on that inner circle. But then here we are, you're reporting he's causing friction inside the Trump team, not just now, but actually for weeks, so what's going on?"

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"I guess the next installment of the show 'Knives Out' is taking place at Mar-a-Lago in the transition," said Caputo. "Because Lutnick is not only just sort of ruffling feathers, they don't really like his style, but early on he ran afoul of RFK, Robert Kennedy Jr., by saying he would never be HHS secretary, and then Trump went ahead and appointed it to him anyway."

"And now his style of sort of knifing other people and trying to keep them from the Treasury post has started to really rub a lot of people the wrong way," Caputo continued. "And he's enlisted the help of others, including now RFK as well as Elon Musk, who even though he's spending all of this time around Donald Trump along with Howard Lutnick, Musk tweeted on Saturday that Lutnick should get the job, and this other rival Scott Bissent shouldn't."

"And there are folks who have been around Trump for a while who said, you know, he probably isn't going to like this sort of pressure on him, both inside Mar-a-Lago and a social media campaign being mounted outside, because he doesn't want to look like he's in the service of Elon Musk," he added. "Donald Trump doesn't really want to look like his puppet."

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