If you haven’t been following the saga at an unassuming government agency known as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, boy have you been missing out.
To catch you up, President Trump recently fired Erika McEntarfer, who’d been appointed by former President Joe Biden to head the agency that, among other things, calculates and releases the monthly jobs report numbers.
It’s long been an independent and nonpolitical post because, well, numbers are numbers and it’s important that they are accurate and unbiased.
But Trump didn’t like the July jobs numbers, which showed the U.S. economy had added fewer jobs than economists expected. So he baselessly accused her of fixing them.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he wrote in a long post on Truth Social.
Just a month earlier, he loved the jobs report she released. “GREAT JOBS NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG!”
Nevertheless, she was out and the frenzied speculation about the future of the BLS began.
Economists and analysts alike were rightly worried Trump would install a partisan lackey to put a better shine on jobs numbers in the future. In other words, to do exactly what he accused McEntarfer of doing — rigging them.
They warned that accurate data was crucial because federal officials rely on it to set interest rates, determine annual cost-of-living adjustments for retirees on Social Security, and to adjust tax brackets, and investors used it to weight portfolios. Students, workers, and headhunters use the data to decide which careers are contracting and which need bigger workforces.
So you can see why cooking the books to reflect a rosier economy than actually exists could have some very deleterious consequences.
Trump, apparently, likes the sound of that.
Enter E.J. Antoni, until now the chief economist at the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.
Earlier this week, Trump announced Antoni as his nominee to replace McEntarfer, and the deep dives into Antoni’s background began. You won’t be shocked to learn, he’s the perfect MAGA candidate for the job.
For one, he’s a partisan hack. A frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, he’s joined Bannon in criticizing the BLS before, including the week those July numbers came out.
“Have we put in our own person into BLS?” Bannon asked Antoni. “Is a MAGA Republican, that President Trump knows and trusts, are they running the Bureau of Labor Statistics yet?” The questions, in and of themselves, revealed a brash willingness to corrupt the agency.
And Antoni’s answer revealed his total agreement. “No, unfortunately, Steve, we still haven’t gotten there.” He went on to call McEntarfer “incompetent.” Later that day, Trump fired her.
Secondly, and speaking of incompetence, Antoni is wholly unqualified. That’s according to fellow conservative economists who know him and work with him.
Antoni’s “work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction,” Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios.
Another AEI economist, Kyle Pomerleau, told the New York Times, “He has either shown a complete misunderstanding of economic data and principles, or he’s showing a willingness to treat his audience with contempt and mislead them.”
And Jessica Riedl, a senior yellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute posted, “The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now. I hope we see better at BLS.”
Antoni has also hinted at suspending the jobs report — just not doing one — until he can be assured the numbers are “accurate.” In other words, Trump-approved.
And Antoni has got a perfect background to match his perfect qualifications. Literally.
Antoni often appears on podcasts or TV shows from his office, in which he’s seated in front of a giant photograph of the World War II battleship Bismarck, “in all his glory” as he put it.
If you’re not a history buff like Antoni purports to be, the Bismarck was a Nazi battleship, and Adolf Hitler’s favorite.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: But where was he on Jan. 6?
He was outside the Capitol, naturally. Per a new report from NBC News, Antoni appears in numerous videos of the Jan. 6 protests.
The footage shows Antoni among the crowd about an hour after insurrectionists removed police barricades, but does not show him entering the Capitol. White House insisted to NBC that he was merely a “bystander,” and there that day for meetings nearby.
Nazi-curious? Unqualified? MAGA? A dream candidate. The total package. The perfect man for the job.
