What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to bury a story about how people don't like Elon Musk.

The New York Times reported on Friday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had gotten into a shouting match with Elon Musk on Thursday. That meeting, which took place in private, had been scheduled as Trump tried to contain the fallout from his Cabinet meeting earlier in the week, at which Musk—dressed in a baseball cap and T-shirt—physically loomed over Trump and other officials and garnered the lion's share of press coverage.

The initial readout of the Thursday meeting was that Trump was taking some tentative steps to rein in Musk's control over the executive branch, telling cabinet secretaries that they—and not Musk—were ultimately in charge of deciding which federal employees could be fired as part of Trump's attempted purge of the civil service. But Trump immediately undercut that by saying that if the secretaries wouldn't do it, Musk would.

Rubio is not the first Trump official to have a problem with Musk's inexplicable dominance over Trump's White House. Even from the first days of the transition, Trump staffers have grumbled that Musk was trying to be "co-President," and that was before the full extent of the authority Trump was willing to let him exercise. 

In a post to his boutique social media site today, Trump called the report of Rubio's anger "FAKE NEWS" and said that "ELON AND MARCO HAVE A GREAT RELATIONSHIP!"

Trump watched the fight at the Thursday meeting, and ultimately intervened to stop it. But it's entirely possible that Trump now believes that Musk and Rubio "have a great relationship," if one or both of them told him they did. Much of his first term was marked by court intrigue between various factions who believed, not without justification, that Trump would simply do whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Staff manipulate him in any number of ways—showing him soothing positive news coverage on demand, concealing bad news to avoid a temper tantrum, or strategically leaking information to provoke a response from him. 

Why does this matter?

• It's bad if a president can be this easily manipulated.