President Donald Trump flatly denied new reporting Friday afternoon that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was at odds with tech billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency honcho Elon Musk.
"No clash. I was there. You're just a troublemaker," Trump said to a reporter with reporters on asking about the incident. "Elon gets along great with Marco. They're both doing a fantastic job. There is no clash."
This comes after the New York Times reported that Musk, whose operation is behind thousands of firings and the controversial suspension of grants and federal programs in agencies across the board, became angry at Trump's Cabinet for not helping him in his objectives, focusing his ire in particular on Rubio.
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According to that report, Musk berated Rubio, saying he fired "nobody" from the State Department except perhaps for the DOGE staffer he had put in there himself. Rubio, who per the sources has been privately enraged about Musk's dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said Musk was not telling the truth about State Department layoffs and proposed his own vision for how the critical diplomatic agency should be restructured.
Reporting earlier in the week indicated that at this same meeting, Trump told Cabinet heads that they, and not Musk, have the final say over personnel decisions at their departments.
While all of this is going on, the Trump administration faces an avalanche of lawsuits over DOGE decisions, which allege many of the restructurings, firings, and pauses of federal spending are illegal. In court, the administration has argued Musk isn't even the actual leader of DOGE.
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