The vicious Situation Room ambush that exposed the feud between Trump's two cockiest Cabinet members

 It didn't help that one had wanted the other's job. 

In their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write about a nasty confrontation in the Situation Room between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in February 2025. 

The Daily Mail had previously reported that the two cocky Cabinet members were engaged in a heated argument at the exclusive Ned's Club of Washington in April of last year, something both of their representatives denied. 

Two months earlier, the book reports that a similar spat had happened in front of President Donald Trump, as both men worked to secure a mineral deal with Ukraine. 

Bessent had traveled to Kyiv earlier in the month to hammer out a deal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

He returned empty-handed, and so Lutnick stepped in. 

The dueling dealmaking came to a head about a week before Trump's infamous Oval Office shouting match with Zelensky. 

'At a meeting of top officials in the Situation Room later that day, Lutnick sat down across from Bessent and slid his new deal across the table,' Haberman and Swan wrote. 'The two men's natural antipathy toward each other was further exacerbated by the fact that Lutnick had originally wanted Bessent's job and had had to settle for commerce secretary instead.'

Lutnick had headed the transition team and aggressively pushed to become Treasury secretary, frustrating some in Trump's orbit, according to ABC News.