Karoline Leavitt Squirms Over Maria Bartiromo’s Blunt Question About Elon Musk

Karoline Leavitt Squirms Over Maria Bartiromo’s Blunt Question About Elon Musk

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Sunday tried to laugh off Fox News host Maria Bartiromo’s question about an alleged physical altercation that reportedly erupted between top Trump ally-turned-detractor Elon Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Citing a news report from The Washington Post that now-departed DOGE boss Musk body-checked Bessent during a blow-out over a difference in opinion at the White House in April, Bartiromo said: “We’re all trying to figure out what happened here and how come this got to this level.”

She then asked Leavitt, “What happened? Did he body-check the Treasury Secretary in the White House?”

Leavitt chuckled and tried to spin the clash as one of the “healthy disagreements amongst the cabinet and Elon Musk” that she claimed only “really speaks to the heart of this cabinet and the president’s team, that they can have these robust disagreements and then still come together to do what’s right for the people they are serving.”

Bartiromo pressed later, “What I’m trying to understand here is how rough this got, because the president said that Elon Musk disrespected the office of the president.”

“Now, we know that there was real disrespect in a lot of those X posts from Elon Musk, for sure. But did he actually get physical?” she continued. “Was there a fistfight that he body-checked the treasury secretary?”

“I certainly wouldn’t describe it as a fist fight, Maria,” Leavitt responded. “It was definitely a disagreement. Although, I was not there, I didn’t witness it with my own eyes. I heard about it through secondhand reporting. But again, we’ve moved on from that. The president has moved on from it.”