If you’re betting on the Bessent-Pulte smackdown, pick Bessent

The Treasury Secretary is Trump's most indispensable Cabinet member. The housing boss is just a hired gun.

Now this is fun. Two of President Trump’s top advisers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and housing agency chief Bill Pulte, dislike each other so much that a fight nearly erupted between the two at a swanky dinner event in Washington, D.C. on September 3.

During cocktails, Bessent supposedly accused Pulte of trash-talking him to Trump, according to Politico. Bessent threatened to punch Pulte in the face, then told club management that one of them would have to go, trying to get Pulte thrown out. Somebody separated the two and the 30-person dinner ended without any punches being thrown.

Presidential administrations normally involve egomaniacal power brokers who can function as an effective team of rivals, as Doris Kearns Goodwin described Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, or as backbiting vipers shaped by the president’s own paranoia, as Richard Nixon’s Cabinet was. Trump’s penchant for chaos lands him on the Nixonian end of the spectrum. If Trump advisers ever do brawl, it could be the new benchmark for White House dysfunction.

When senior government officials snipe at each other, somebody usually wins and somebody usually loses. If that’s where the Bessent-Pulte feud is heading, Bessent is the odds-on favorite and Pulte is an upstart trying to punch way above his weight.

Bessent may be Trump’s most indispensable Cabinet secretary. He can be as ingratiating as any other Trump toady, but he’s got one huge asset: Investors trust him, for now, and Bessent’s survival is important to financial market stability. Bessent comes from Wall Street, he talks like a Wall Streeter and he knows how to communicate with the people controlling much of the nation’s financial wealth. Pulte, by contrast, is a replaceable functionary who’s likely overestimating his own value to Trump.

At the annual Milken Institute financial conference in Los Angeles in May, Bessent gave the opening remarks, at a moment when Trump had imposed drastic tariffs on Chinese imports and stocks were in a swoon. Other financial bigwigs at the conference found his remarks reassuring. “The Treasury Secretary’s articulation was one of the best I’ve heard in terms of how this all fits together,” Harvey Schwartz, CEO of private-equity giant Carlyle, told the well-heeled audience.

Bessent is playing a kind of wink-and-nod game with investors, backing some of Trump’s extremist ideas while also sounding a bit more measured, as if sometimes you just have to let the mad king rant. He has called for reforms at the Federal Reserve, for instance, but not the firing of chair Jerome Powell or massive interest-rate cuts, as Trump has demanded. In a Sept. 5 Wall Street Journal article, Bessent proposed more modest reforms, such as the transfer of bank oversight to other agencies. Many investors interpret Bessent’s M.O. as saying what he must to placate Trump while signaling to markets that things are still more or less normal.

Pulte is more of a hired gun. His main contribution to Trump’s agenda so far has been digging up dirt on Trump enemies in millions of housing records he has access to as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte found the records showing that Fed Governor Lisa Cook, who Trump wants to fire and replace with a loyalist, listed more than one home as a primary residence on mortgages she took out before she arrived at the Fed, which Trump said gave him grounds to fire her. Cook is suing and so far remains in her job.

Pulte is a multimillionaire who’s grandson of the man who founded home builder PulteGroup, sitting on its board for a spell. He’s just 37, with a gunslinger persona Trump probably enjoys. Pulte would play a key role if the Trump administration went forward with a plan to make housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public, which would be a complex and risky undertaking, since they’re bedrock guarantors of the whole US housing market.

But Pulte has no special skills that hundreds of other financiers lack, and there may be even more qualified people to take Fannie and Freddie public. As a sign of Pulte’s shaky standing, some Congressional Republicans now have the knives out for him, with one telling Politico, “he’s a nut.” This is the kind of bad press you start to get inside the Beltway when your enemies smell blood and decide to pile on.

If Bessent were to square off against Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, it might be a closer fight. Lutnick, former head of a Wall Street bond house, is a heavier hitter in finance than Pulte is, and arguably more accomplished than Bessent, who’s own hedge fund foundered.

But Lutnick’s role is to serve as Trump’s attack dog, cheerlead for the Trump tariffs and be just as outrageous as Trump. So far, he has poo-poohed an imagined Social Security recipient who didn’t get her monthly check, pumped up Tesla’s stock and told Congress that any bananas grown in the United States—where bananas don’t grow—will escape a 10% tariff. If he were to replace Bessent as Treasury Secretary, investors would swallow hard and hover over the sell button. And Trump would try to coax Bessent back.