A couple of weeks after Donald Trump responded to his ugly record on jobs by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the president introduced his own nominee: E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. Almost immediately, Antoni was exposed as an almost cartoonishly poor choice.
His academic background, for example, leaves little doubt that he’s spectacularly unqualified to lead the bureau. But there’s no need to stop there: Antoni also has a record of misunderstanding the very government data he’s supposed to oversee; he’s signaled an interest in moving away from releasing monthly job reports; he’s derided Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme”; and he helped craft the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint.
There’s a reason Antoni has been mocked by his contemporaries as “a joke.”
Just when it seemed Antoni’s record couldn’t get much worse, NBC News reported that the BLS nominee was also among the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s against this backdrop that CNN reported:
President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics operated a since-deleted Twitter account that featured sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump. … [Antoni] posted the comments from approximately 2017 through 2020 under a series of usernames and display names. CNN verified that all of Antoni’s posts came from the same Twitter account and that the posts from the anonymous aliases shared strikingly similar biographical details as Antoni.
While the reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, CNN’s report does dovetail with a recent report from Wired magazine that highlighted, among other things, apparent Antoni posts referencing conspiracy theories related to Covid and the 2020 election, and references to weapons used by Nazi Germany in World War II.
The White House has made no effort to push back against the reporting, instead claiming that the president’s nominee “has the experience and credentials needed to restore solution-oriented leadership at the BLS.”
Given everything we know about Antoni, there’s little reason to believe that’s true.
The broader question is whether Senate Republicans will care. His nomination will have to advance through the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee — a panel that includes Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — and it’s a safe bet they’ll take note of an online item in which Antoni appears to have written, after Sen. John McCain’s death, “I like a senator who doesn’t die.” Unless the White House has reason to believe Antoni’s nomination is doomed and not worth fighting for, he will receive a confirmation hearing, which has not yet been scheduled. Watch this space. UPDATE (September 5, 2025, 4:49 p.m. ET): Responding to the latest reporting, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a written statement: “E.J. Antoni is seriously unwell — he is apparently a disturbed, hateful, conspiracy-driven man who does not belong in government. Not only is he an unqualified, partisan hack but apparently he has been a prolific promoter of vile, hate-filled screeds against women, sexual abuse survivors, and anyone who disagrees with Donald Trump. E.J. Antoni should withdraw his nomination immediately, and this kind of revolting behavior should be a red line for all Senators. Every Republican Senator should be asked about these comments and whether they trust Antoni’s judgment. Any Senator who considers voting to confirm him should understand: a vote for Antoni is not only a vote against America’s economic stability and the credibility of our jobs data, but the implicit endorsement of hateful, disgusting, and backward ideas that belong in the garbage heap of history.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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