How unhinged and irresponsible is Elon Musk? So much that even President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed and MAGA-certified Cabinet members are pushing back.

Musk’s email blast on Saturday to 2.3 million federal workers — ordering each to submit by Monday “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week,” with failure to respond constituting the employee’s resignation — was nothing but an exercise in contempt. And in many agencies, it was promptly countermanded.

Employees at the Defense Department, under Secretary Pete Hegseth, were told to ignore the government-wide email from the Office of Personnel Management, now being run by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service minions. Workers at the State Department under Secretary Marco Rubio were also told to pay it no mind. So were staffers at the nation’s spy agencies under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; those at the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi L. Noem; and those at the FBI, which is part of the Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi.

At some other agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., many workers were told by their supervisors to wait for further guidance. In other words, we’ll let you know what’s going on when we find out.

Thus begins the inevitable power struggle at the court of Mad King Donald, between his various ministers of state and his billionaire Lord High Executioner. For the past month, with Trump’s nominees making their way through the confirmation process and then learning their way around the agencies they now lead, Musk has run rampant. His approach toward the federal bureaucracy is the same he used when he bought Twitter: smash the place to bits, then rebuild as necessary.

As technically a “special government employee” who serves as an adviser to the president, it is unclear that Musk has the legal authority to do any of what he is doing. But by the time the courts decide that question, much irreparable vandalism will already have been committed.

Musk was clever to begin by seizing key nodes of the bureaucracy — OPM and the Treasury Department’s payments systems — and to use them as chokepoints. He was Machiavellian in choosing a relatively defenseless first victim, the U.S. Agency for International Development, to slay and hang on the wall as a demonstration of his power.

But now that Cabinet members and agency heads are in place, things are different.

Hegseth, Rubio, Gabbard, Bondi and the rest of Trump’s appointees now have large bureaucracies to run. However fervently they agree with the goal of shrinking the federal government’s headcount, they will be less able to fulfill Trump’s agenda, let alone any goals of their own, if their employees are constantly being bashed and menaced by the erratic Musk. As anyone who has successfully run any organization knows, morale matters.

Authority matters, too. Cabinet members have the right to insist that they, not Musk, run their departments. They wouldn’t be where they are if they were eager to challenge Trump’s judgment.

And anyway, who is supposed to read 2.3 million emails? According to The Post, one U.S. Geological Survey employee defiantly told his supervisors that “anyone who replies is likely to have their responses fed into some AI woodchipper and used for goodness knows what purpose, legal or illegal.”

On Monday, Trump said the bullet points email was “great because we have people that don’t show up to work” or that “don’t even exist.” At the same time, however, Trump did not overrule the orders of Cabinet members who told employees to ignore the email. As he now fancies himself a king, Trump may enjoy the sport of combat among his courtiers.

Pressure is mounting, however, for Trump to bring Musk’s escapades under control. This weekend, Republican members of Congress who held town halls with their constituents got an earful about the impact of Musk’s arbitrary cost-cutting.

Musk and his DOGE bros act as if they are playing a video game in which federal workers and programs are mere pixels on a screen. Pressure should and will mount for Trump to tell them: “GAME OVER.”

Eugene Robinson is a Washington Post columnist.