As a rule, the process surrounding Donald Trump’s nominees is relatively efficient. The president taps a loyalist with dubious qualifications; Senate Republicans do what the White House tells them to do; and the nominees are confirmed to powerful positions that most shouldn’t have.
But there are some exceptions to the rule. Indeed, the list of failed Trump nominees has quietly become rather long. The list includes Matt Gaetz, Dave Weldon, Ed Martin, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, Chad Chronister, Kathleen Sgamma, Jared Isaacman and, as of this week, E.J. Antoni. NBC News reported:
The White House on Tuesday withdrew the nomination of E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist, to be the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. … Antoni, a contributor to Project 2025, was backed by Steve Bannon for the post.
For those unfamiliar with Antoni and his nomination, let’s take a minute to review how we arrived at this point.
A couple of weeks after Trump responded to his ugly record on jobs by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics without cause, the president introduced his own nominee: Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. Almost immediately, he was exposed as an almost cartoonishly poor choice.
His academic background, for example, left little doubt that he was spectacularly unqualified to lead the bureau. But there was no need to stop there: Antoni also had a record of misunderstanding the very government data he was supposed to oversee; he’d signaled an interest in moving away from releasing monthly job reports; he’d derided Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme”; and he’d helped craft the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint.
There was a reason Antoni had 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. Soon after, CNN and Wired separately reported on Antoni’s since-deleted Twitter account, which featured sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories and weird references to weapons used by Nazi Germany in World War II.
After Sen. John McCain’s death, Antoni also reportedly wrote online, “I like a senator who doesn’t die.”
This came to public light in early September. In mid-September, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Antoni could be counted on to generate “truthful and honest data.” In late September, the White House pulled the plug on this fiasco. To be sure, part of what makes these developments notable is what unfolded on Capitol Hill. This is, after all, only the third time since Election Day 2024 when just enough Senate Republicans mustered the courage to say, effectively, “Whoa, hold on, we can’t go that far,” following comparable reactions to Gaetz and Martin. But as the dust settles on this debacle, it’s also worth pausing to appreciate that the Trump White House obviously didn’t bother to do its due diligence on Antoni, reinforcing concerns about rampant incompetence in the West Wing. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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