Trump’s BLS Pick Is a Total Clown Show

Summary

Bulwark Takes: "Trump’s BLS Pick Is a Total Clown Show" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: August 14, 2025
Hosts: Tim Miller and Bill Kristol
Podcast: Bulwark Takes by The Bulwark

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Bulwark Takes, hosts Tim Miller and Bill Kristol delve into the contentious nomination of E.J. Antoni as the new Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under the Trump administration. The discussion is rich with critical analysis, highlighting concerns about Antoni’s qualifications, ideological leanings, and potential impact on economic reporting and policy.

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E.J. Antoni’s Nomination: A Questionable Choice

The episode opens with Tim Miller expressing frustration over the Trump administration’s latest appointment:

Tim Miller [00:00]: "He's the person that Trump has put in to replace the old Commissioner of Labor Statistics. He's a total hack. Every credible economist has been trashing him."

Bill Kristol concurs, emphasizing the lack of support Antoni has within the economic community:

Bill Kristol [00:47]: "He's a real kook and Bannon loves him... he's probably not gonna get the job. But it's a very good illustration of the normalization of everything right."

The hosts criticize the rapid and seemingly unqualified selection process, suggesting that Antoni's nomination reflects a broader trend of diminishing standards within the administration.

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Nazi Symbolism in the BLS Office

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the disturbing presence of a Nazi battleship mural in Antoni’s office. Tim Miller brings this to light:

Tim Miller [02:42]: "And behind him is this big mural kind of of a German battleship, the Bismarck, named after Otto von Bismarck that was launched by the Nazis in the late 1930s to attack the US and the Allies."

Bill Kristol provides historical context, questioning the appropriateness of such symbolism:

Bill Kristol [03:28]: "Right behind him. And it was sort of famously a Nazi talking point... It's very Americana-ish. I don't think the Biswark is very Americana-ish."

The hosts argue that displaying a symbol associated with Nazi Germany is not only inappropriate but also indicative of Antoni’s extremist inclinations.

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Antoni’s Presence on January 6th

Tim Miller presents alarming evidence of Antoni’s involvement during the January 6th Capitol riot:

Tim Miller [04:42]: "Ryan Riley... spotted Antony on January 6th. He was there. The White House says he was a bystander... but he’s deep in there... in the red garb."

Bill Kristol further scrutinizes Antoni’s actions, linking them to his questionable character:

Bill Kristol [05:51]: "He fits in... the extremism is really real... fanaticism, really."

This revelation raises serious concerns about Antoni’s commitment to democratic principles and his potential influence within the BLS.

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Challenges in Senate Confirmation

The conversation shifts to the Senate's role in confirming Antoni’s appointment. Tim Miller expresses skepticism about the willingness of senators to oppose the nomination:

Tim Miller [08:04]: "There are all these senators from the pre-Trump times who... there's not really even any hope. I don't think that any of them will set, will draw the line here."

Bill Kristol echoes this sentiment, highlighting the shift in the Senate’s dynamics:

Bill Kristol [07:07]: "Yeah. They did confirm Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from higher level jobs... So I think the degree the rapidity... it's becoming inevitable."

The hosts lament the apparent erosion of traditional checks and balances, suggesting that extremist nominees are increasingly passing through the confirmation process unchallenged.

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Impact on Economic Data and the Business Community

A critical concern discussed is the potential manipulation of economic data under Antoni’s leadership. Tim Miller underscores the importance of accurate data for the economy:

Tim Miller [10:01]: "The Bureau of Labor success is what that is. If they want to pretend like inflation isn't happening, then maybe the seniors won't get that uptick."

Bill Kristol warns of future distortions:

Bill Kristol [10:01]: "It's like the normal incentives, the normal... couldn't care less."

The hosts argue that Antoni’s lack of understanding and potential biases could lead to skewed reports on jobs and inflation, adversely affecting policies tied to these metrics, such as Social Security adjustments.

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Normalization of Extremism in Government

Both hosts reflect on the broader implications of Antoni’s nomination, viewing it as part of a disturbing trend towards extremism within the government:

Bill Kristol [07:40]: "The administration is both more clownish and much more extremist than I think even... we're way beyond that. The extremism is really real."

Tim Miller adds that this normalization makes previously unthinkable appointments seem inevitable:

Tim Miller [01:56]: "The Overton window moves very fast. What becomes ridiculous becomes inevitable quite quickly."

They express deep concern over the administration’s direction, suggesting that extremist ideologies are gaining a foothold in key governmental positions.

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Conclusion

In wrapping up the episode, Tim Miller reiterates the significance of Antoni’s nomination and its broader ramifications:

Tim Miller [13:18]: "Couldn't care less. All right, Bill Kristol, I appreciate the extra time with you this week."

The hosts call for vigilance and continued scrutiny of such appointments to prevent the undermining of crucial institutions like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They hint at upcoming discussions on related topics, including Russia, signaling ongoing critical analysis in future episodes.

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Key Takeaways:

• E.J. Antoni’s appointment as BLS Commissioner is heavily criticized for his lack of qualifications and extremist associations.
• The presence of a Nazi battleship mural in Antoni’s office raises concerns about his ideological leanings.
• Antoni’s involvement in the January 6th events further discredits his suitability for a government role.
• The Senate’s potential failure to challenge such nominees signals a worrying trend towards normalization of extremism.
• There is a significant risk of economic data manipulation, which could have far-reaching consequences for policy and public trust.
• The overall discussion paints a bleak picture of increasing authoritarianism and extremism within the current administration.

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This episode of Bulwark Takes provides a thorough and incisive examination of the Trump administration’s nomination of E.J. Antoni to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, highlighting systemic issues and urging listeners to remain informed and vigilant.

Transcript

[Tim Miller]

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bulwark here. We got a bonus Tim and Bill Kristol segment this week. We had a little extra time this morning and any time that there's news about a Trump administration sycophant seeming to have a Nazi fetish, I got to pull in Bill Kristol to talk about that. So we have a few news items that this guy E.J. antoni, if you're following this feed, you know who we're talking about. He's the person that Trump has put in to replace the old Commissioner of Labor Statistics. He's a total hack. Every credible economist has been trashing him. We have a few stories about him today, the Nazi fetish. And then we've got. He was there on January 6. Then we have some pretty bad economic news. Bill, is this new since we talked on Monday? Did we talk about EJ when we were.

[Bill Kristol]

I don't think he'd be announced yet. I think it seems like time flies when you're having fun. Wasn't the BLS commissioner just fired? It was a week ago, right? It was like, yeah, it was just a week ago. For the next couple of days there was a certain amount of, well, the deputy commissioner's taking over and so let's see, you know, and the place kind of runs itself and let's see what happens then. Then I remember reading like a day or two into it, it was Sunday. Ish. You know. Well, there's this guy Antoni at Heritage. I mean, he's a real kook and Bannon loves him and I mean, he's the kind of the right wing candidate for the job, but I mean, he's probably not gonna get the job. I mean, Scott Besant and those guys won't allow that, you know. And then like Tuesday morning he's announced and by Wednesday afternoon it's like he'll probably get through the Senate, you know, it's like. Yeah. I mean, so it's a very good illustration, though, of the normalization of every. Right. I mean, that the stuff that seems impossible, A, that he would fire the guy, the woman who's been there and who's doing a perfectly competent job, apparently. And B, that. And then it gets taken a little seriously when there were problems with statistics. Those revisions are pretty good. And then there's a wacko guy who's mentioned. But that's not going to happen. Then the wacko guy's nominated but probably won't be confirmed. Now he's going to be maybe will be confirmed. So I think the Degree. The rapidity with which the frogs are boiling in the water or whatever the metaphor is.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, the Overton window moves very fast. What becomes ridiculous becomes inevitable quite quickly. Well, just a couple. So we have these two stories as teased. Sometimes you can decide how much you want to make of this. But we have this guy who is just a total Trump toady and he was doing a podcast with Benny Johnson, who's an insane person and a hack, and was on the take from Russia. And behind him is this big mural kind of of a German battleship, the Bismarck, named after Otto von Bismarck that was launched by the Nazis in the late 1930s to attack the US and the Allies. Are you a ship, Are you interested in, in big ships, Bill? Was that part of your history? I'm not a big ship man.

[Bill Kristol]

I'm not a ship guy. But I read up, you know, enough on it that I. Yeah, huge hoopla. Hitler personally announced it in 39. Kind of overrated and oversold. Destroyed by the Royal Navy in 41 in nine months, I think in 1941. So that's a good thing. But. So it's a famous ship. On the one hand there are like movies about it and it was dug up, wasn't it? And they found the, you know, there was like that with this movies about that on, you know, the History Channel and so forth. So on the one hand you could say, well, he's a ship enthusiast and this is one of several ships he has in his office or whatever that is that he's, you know, video casting from. And I suppose you could explain away on the end, it is the most prominent one. It's right behind him. And it was sort of famously a Nazi talking point. Right. I mean Hitler did. It was like a thing, you know, when they, when they launched it. This is the biggest and best ship ever and bullshit like that.

[Tim Miller]

So yeah, it's kind of like having a, a mural of like, of a failed Confederate general, like Pemberton behind you or something. It's sort of like, well, why would you choose that? I mean, I guess there is a famous ship. It's a famous ship, sure. But as you mentioned, it was. It failed. And it was Nazi. It was the Nazis. So if you really just were impress by, you know, big ships and the naval. Naval history does feel like you choose something else. So anyway, if it was a. It was a total one off. If it was kind of a mainstream person who, you know, a serious person who happens to have the German ship behind them, you might think, okay, well that's A little strange, but. But you know, when it's. When you get a series of data points, it does raise some eyebrows. Data point two, Ryan Riley, great reporter over at NBC. We've had him on the channel a few times. He, he spotted Antony on January 6th. And the images put out by the, by the January 6th Select Committee of the crowd, he was there. It seems like both of them were staying the east side at various times. I'm going to put this picture up here. We'll put this picture up. The White House says he was a bystander and that he was leaving. If you look at this picture, he's turned as if he's leaving, but he's deep in there. I mean, it's not like he was over by the Washington Monument. You're quite deep towards the Capitol in the red garb. You know, again, didn't breach the Capitol, but seems like a pretty poor judgment call in line with the Nazi ship.

[Bill Kristol]

Right. You know, just one thing on the generation on the Nazi battleship which I hadn't really focused on. Heritage is very involved in all this. You know, we have to be writing American history. Right. They're cousins. A lot of their people are close to that movement. Smithsonian can't show anything divisive or derogatory. And it's all going to be edifying, upbeat, you know, low 50s vision of America's success. Yeah. You know, it feels a little funny that this guy from Heritage is sitting there with that maybe tells you a little bit about it. I mean, the obvious thing, if you're at Heritage. I know people at Heritage. You and I have known them over the years. Even in the old days, Heritage is this way. You'd have the big American flag, you'd have the big American ship, you'd have the big American success story, you'd have, you know, the planes, whatever. Right. It would be very Americana. Ish. I don't think the Biswark is very American Ish.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, it is noteworthy. Yeah, they're trying to, you know. No, we don't want to, you know, advance any history about, like, look, we're changing ship names, right? Like, we don't want the Harvey Milk on the ship. You know, we don't want a Harvey Milk's name on one of our ships because, you know that Harvey Milk's a gay and a mayor and there's controversy. Like, we're going to focus more on American strength. So it's noteworthy. You know, we got to take Harvey off of our ship, but meanwhile, we can honor and put in a place of prestige, the Nazi Bismarck. Anyway, back to January 6th. He's there, you know, again, it's one of these things where it's like, if it's one thing, okay. But you know, he is, he's fudging numbers for Trump on social media. He doesn't seem to understand basic, some basic economic facts based on, you know, what some of our friends, Jason Furman and others have observed of his, of his publications. He, he's there on January 6th. Not really like an economist thing, like our boy Stan Voiger over at aei. I don't think he was there mixing and mingling on January 6th. You know, it's not like a, you know, it wasn't really a pencil crowd there on January 6th. It's alarming, I guess I would say. I mean, we sort of know what we already need to from his public tweets, but it's not, nothing I said.

[Bill Kristol]

To someone last night made this point. It's kind of altogether totally unqualified kind of joke of an economist. Total TRUMP Sycophant. January 6th, the Bismarck thing behind him, it's like, I don't know. And he said maybe the Senate would draw the line there. And it was like, well, they did confirm Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. From higher level jobs and many others. Yeah. Jeanine Pirro, you know, so I don't know. He fits in. Again, it gets back committed to the original point about the normalization and the what's ridiculous becomes. That was a good formulation you had. What was that? What's ridiculous becomes inevitable.

[Tim Miller]

Inevitable.

[Bill Kristol]

I mean, the, the administration is both more clownish and much more extremist than I think even, I don't know, even, even I have trouble come to go through that. You know what I mean? You sort of think at some level down it's going to be, you know, not people we, you and I would agree with or admire very much, but semi normal, just right wingers, you know, doing their right wing thing. We're in pretty, we're in pretty extreme waters there, even for today's right wing.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, we're in weirdo turf. And this is, we're both obsessed with this, so we don't need to spend too much time about it. But when you think about the Senate confirmation as the Senate confirmable position, you know, there's always the focus on the people that have been the main dissenters. Murkowski, COLLINS at times, McConnell at times. Tillis, because he's now leaving the Senate. Like all the discussion. I just. Because with the news of Sherrod Brown running for Senate. Just it had me kind of rethinking of some of the other senators that just kind of have like faded into the background. Like John Husted, who's now the senator who took J.D. vance's slot, who was like I think Secretary of State or I forget one of those state level offices in Ohio was in the mainstream Republican world his whole career. You know, Dave McCormick, who I mentioned, Mike Rounds, like there are all these. There still remain a bunch of senators from the pre Trump times who you know, you would think like might have some issue with something like so, and, and yet there's not really even any hope. I don't think that any of them will set, will draw the line here.

[Bill Kristol]

You think there's some, you think there's a little hope? No, I always, I try to keep hope alive and then of course then it gets dashed.

[Tim Miller]

We shouldn't give up. We shouldn't give up.

[Bill Kristol]

No. It is bad incidentally speaking. So to go outside the Senate for a second. Same point in a way you're making just a different angle. These business groups that have been totally pathetic and haven't objected to anything and are busy sucking up to Trump and so forth.

[Tim Miller]

I remember Obama was a socialist. Obama, end of the free market economy.

[Bill Kristol]

For a lot of groups this is actually though it's one thing they don't care about unless they're a farmer about Kennedy and they don't care about Hegseth, they don't do defense, you know, blah blah blah. But this is like a business oriented position, if you know what I mean. Like they all have economists, they all have chief economists at Goldman and elsewhere who think this guy's a total clown. Will any of them like speak up and say, you know, kind of good to have someone we sort of our economists could sort of talk to as a grown up there over there at bls, you know.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Or pressure of the senators. You know, again, like, like back in our day when we were doing this, like there are these campaigns and we get business groups together and you know there'd be, you know, you get ideological groups, everybody work together and you'd try to pressure senators don't vote for so and so. You're not even seeing that anymore. Okay, to why this really matters just substantively. In addition to the jobs numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also measures inflation and Social Security is pegged to inflation. So this is like so you know, there's a bunch of elements of this where the investing community matters to them. And as you Mentioned the business community, they want good numbers. But even just for any senior, right. If inflation is going up, the Bureau of Labor success is what that is. And then there's, you know, you get a little bit of an uptick in your Social Security to match the uptick in inflation. If they want to pretend like inflation isn't happening, then maybe the seniors won't get that uptick. And we have the news out today, which is the producer Price index, which is up 3%, up much higher than expected. The nerds I follow on social media are like, wow, the PPI is on fire for people who don't know what that is. The Producer Price index is a measure of wholesale inflation. So like business to business cpi, which people hear more about is consumer, the prices consumers pay. So you're not necessarily seeing this in what you're paying at the store right now. But a lot of times the PPI precedes the cpi, right, because businesses start paying more for their wholesale and then eventually they pass that price on to consumers. So you have this guy coming in who said that he's not going to put out jobs numbers. I don't think it's crazy to think that they will f with inflation numbers.

[Bill Kristol]

I totally agree. And the same people who sort of said kind of a little understandably, well, this guy can't possibly get appointed, are now saying, well, you know, there are a thousand economists, there are 200 or something and you can't just, they're going to produce a real number and he can't just overrule them. I mean, it would be like two of them would quit and there'd be bad press for a day or two. And I feel like that's one of those things that everyone's going to say until he does it in, you know, at a time when it's politically important in September of 2026 or something like that. And of course they'll go ahead and do it and Trump will say that it was right to do it and there'll be a day of bad press and then it will be done. And now so I'm, people are right to be alarmed about this. And again, I just come back to this. Kennedy, well, he wasn't going to do the things that, you know, he'd been irresponsible when he was just a private citizen, but as cabinet secretary he wasn't going to actually stop life saving vaccines. I mean, come on, you know, it's like so, I mean, again, I think the degree to which we just underrate the momentum of the authoritarianism and the real deep down extremism. And that does get a little back to the Bismarck and so forth. January 6th. We are not putting in, as I say, heritage right wing ideologues at this point. You know, Steve Moore, someone we do in the old day who's gone totally Trumpy and Kudlow, those types. Right. I mean, it's, it's, we're way beyond that. The extremism is, is really real, I guess, is what I'm struck by looking at this guy, you know, fanaticism, really. Right. And which means that the normal incentives, the normal. Well, he can't do that because it'd be embarrassing for him among other economists. Couldn't care less.

[Tim Miller]

Couldn't care less. All right, Bill Kristol, I appreciate the extra time with you this week. I'll keep you on the bat phone if there's, if there's more World War II Nazi paraphernalia in the administration. Everybody else subscribe to the feed. I've got a guest coming up today on today's podcast. We're doing a lot of the Russia stuff and, and we've got a couple more fun, fun things for you, too. So stick around. We'll see you soon.