Trump nominates Jan 6 "bystander" to produce better job numbers

One more benchmark for Trump's assault on state capacity

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

E.J. Antoni at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Parler, via ProPubilica.

E.J. Antoni has experienced a meteoric rise. President Trump nominated him to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, America’s most prestigious producer of economic data, just five years after he completed his PhD at Northern Illinois University. His C.V. is untroubled by citations attesting to his influence, peer reviewed publications, or relevant experience for the job.

Antoni holds the title of Chief Economist at the Heritage Foundation, the publisher of Project 2025. He has been a fierce critic of the BLS, as has Trump (at least when the numbers make Trump look bad, though he was happy to cite them when they made Biden look bad). Trump was eventually forced to withdraw Antoni’s nomination, after leading two Republican Senators refused to meet with him, making it clear he would not have the votes to succeed.

What explains Antoni’s rise? Slavish loyalty, not merit.

Since Trump has already said that the economy is booming, he merely needs an loyalist who will provide numbers to support these claims. And that is precisely what he thinks Antoni offers. Antoni is a regular on conservative media and the last three blogs give a flavor of his willingness to unconditionally praise every action Trump takes.

Some online wits (ok, me) suggested that Antoni’s resemblance to an amateur magician made him the perfect pick to make Trump’s bad job numbers disappear.¹

This week we discovered an even clearer demonstration of Antoni’s loyalty: he attended the January 6th event, and was outside the Capitol as Trump’s supporters broke through barricades, assaulted officers, and managed to temporarily suspend the certification of the election, and the tradition of a peaceful transition of power.

This revelation came from Ryan Reilly, author of the book Sedition Hunters, about the efforts to hold those who attacked the Capitol accountable. The subtitle of the book is “How January 6th Broke the Justice System.” Is this hyperbole? Lets review:

• Trump has pardoned those who assaulted the Capitol, treating them as political prisoners, unfairly prosecuted. The family of Ashlee Babbit, who was shot and killed by police during the assault, received $5 million in compensation. Trump officials have argued for broader payments to the rioters.

• Despite civil service protections, Trump has fired Department of Justice career prosecutors who investigated January 6th, and a senior FBI official who refused to hand over the name of FBI agents who investigated the assault on the Capitol.

• Antoni is not the first January 6th attendee Trump has promoted to positions of public importance. Jared Wise, who was alleged to have called for the murder of police during the insurrection, is now advising the Department of Justice on the weaponization on government. He seems well-qualified on that topic at least.

To be clear, there is no evidence that Antoni entered the Capitol on January 6th. But who can trust someone who attended an event centered on denying the 2020 election count to be the nation’s top statistician? Donald Trump, that’s who.

Trump wants to replace an actual “Highly Respected Economist” holding literally decades of relevant experience with someone who would not be competitive for an entry level job at the organization he would now lead. Because Trump knows that a person who owes their ascendency to Trumpism has no professional reputation worth protecting.

The White House told reporters that Antoni was merely a “bystander” at Jan 6th. Really? What was he doing? Getting lost as he tried to visit the Smithsonian? Trying to calculate the crowd numbers? Putting “insurrections near me” into google maps?

According to the White House: “EJ was in town for meetings.” This raises even more questions. Like what meetings had Antoni organized on the Capitol Mall on January 6th? Who exactly was he meeting?

But reporting finds that Antoni ran a now deleted Twitter account that shared election conspiracy theories after the 2020 election. So it seems like he was more committed to the beliefs that fueled January 6 insurrection than a random bystander. The account also shared Covid conspiracy theories, and sexually degrading comments about Kamala Harris, which may help explain with Senators Murkowsi and Collins drew the line at meeting with him.

The White House concludes that “it is wrong and defamatory to suggest EJ engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal.” Clearly! After all, according to the White House, it is neither inappropriate nor illegal for Trump supporters to break through barricades, damage the Capitol, assault police officers or upend an election. (On the other hand, if you are not a Trump supporter, and throw a Subway sandwich at an officer in DC, that is a felony for which you will lose your job).

If that is not inappropriate, then nothing Antoni has done could be deemed inappropriate. Even having a Nazi battleship as his zoom background seems fine.

Indeed, Antoni appears to be part of the far right movement that blames Churchill for pursuing World War II.

And again, it is not as if Trump is getting a superstar with some questionable views and poor judgement. The questionable views and poor judgement is all he is getting. Those are the reasons Antoni is even being considered.

Antoni shares his economic insights online, which sometimes leads other researchers to correct his misrepresentations/misunderstandings in ways that should be truly disqualifying:

Even some conservative economists are brave enough to publicly say that a free market system requires reliable data to be credible, and that someone with a record of fudging data is simply not up for the job.

For example, Dave Herbert of the American Institute for Economic Research told The Guardian:

From selectively presenting data from particularly convenient dates to misrepresenting axes to exaggerate magnitudes, he has used all the tricks in the book and shown time and again that he is not a credible source of information. Worse, he has repeatedly shown that he fundamentally misunderstands what some of the data the BLS puts out actually means. It’s difficult to imagine someone effectively leading a vital organization like the BLS who cannot correctly define the data they’re putting out.

Kyle Pomerleau, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, another conservative think tank said:

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.

What makes this ironic is that Antoni is one of those right wingers that likes to talk about IQ. Indeed, he told a group of Heritage Foundation interns that men are more likely to have feature at the upper and lower end of the IQ spectrum while women were more likely to cluster in the middle. Even if you believe this, its a weird thing to tell a group of students during an experience that is supposed to feature a mentoring component.

For all his talk of IQ and gender, Antoni sees no problem in taking the job of woman who is eminently more qualified than him in a domain where he cannot get basic facts right. The unearned sense of superiority, rather than actual merit, seems to be a critical qualification in the Trump administration.

Antoni’s meteoric rise is an inverse measure of the swift decline of American state capacity under Trump. To be sure, every presidential administration has some mediocrities, but in the Trump administration they are the norm. In a functioning government, the inept are put in places where they can do limited damage. In the Trump administration, they are selected for their willingness to break key institutions.

Trump can nominate who he wants to lead the BLS. The position is a designated political appointee. But in his first term he appointed a credible conservative economist, William Beach, who defended the BLS from political interference. Trump was also happy to leave the well-qualified incumbent in place until the jobs numbers stopped looking good. Now he needs someone who will make the data look good, no matter the underlying reality.

It is not just the personnel is different from Trump’s first term. So is the environment. Politicization undermines expertise in multiple ways. Trump now routinely (and illegally) fires career civil servants for any reason. This gives Antoni more power to lean on BLS data nerds. If we start to see a) lots of BLS employees leaving, or b) changes to data collection and reporting processes that don’t make sense, its a good sign that the system has been corrupted.

How bad could it get? One comparison is to countries like Argentina, Turkey and Greece that cooked their data, making them untrustworthy for investors. We can also look at DOGE as a contemporary example of Trump-era data manipulation. DOGE claimed to have cut hundreds of billions in a way that was “maximally transparent.” But the underlying data was difficult to verify, and it took months of investigative reporting to reveal the claims were mostly bunk. For example, a new analysis by Politico found that less than 5% of claimed DOGE contract cuts resulted in real cost reductions.

This is what public data reporting in a politicized regime looks like: flattering, opaque, and ultimately fantastical.

The position of BLS head ultimately requires some technical expertise, and enough credibility to be able to reassure the markets. Antoni has neither. The Friends of the BLS, a group of former BLS Commissioners that includes Trump’s first-term Commissioner pointed out the ideal qualifications of a BLS Commissioner, which include:

· Strong management experience

· Deep expertise in economic statistics and the respect of other experts

· Extensive engagement with the federal statistical agencies and particularly with BLS

· Understanding of BLS products and broader relevance

· Visibility in the statistical community

· The ability to interact effectively with both Congress and senior Department of Labor staff

· Have a record of understanding that trust and data integrity are mission-critical for BLS

· Publicly promise to honor and defend the statistical integrity of BLS products as well as the safeguards in place to that end

The group did not explicitly weigh in on Antoni. It didn’t need to. Simply posting an apolitical list of merit-based hiring criteria sufficed to clearly expose his shortcomings. In addition to being unqualified, Senators will also have to consider if a “bystander” who stood by as a mob attacked them can be trusted with the crown jewels of US economic data.

1. This is a deep cut reference to a one-off character in The IT Crowd, dubbed Michael the Magnificent. I realize I need to update my cultural references away from decades-old cult UK TV shows.