Trump announced that he would nominate E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Another excellent choice:
Trump's nominee for BLS commissioner, EJ Antoni, is disastrously terrible. He's a 1200%, 1300% maybe 1400% in-the-tank Trumper, with few credentials beyond a long history of misrepresenting or misunderstanding basic economic statistics. He has demonstrated no commitment to truth.…
Trump fires the head of BLS because he doesn’t like the July jobs report or the revisions to recent reports.
People in economics freak out because they suddenly get concerned that government data will become corrupted and untrustworthy.
If Trump wanted to reassure people that government data could be trusted, he would have picked some normie conservative economist for the BLS job.
Instead he picks a hack he sees on Fox.
This is a move designed not to calm the markets, but to provoke them.
Nominating Antoni is Trump making a promise that government data will no longer be trustworthy.3
Late yesterday Trump made this promise explicit: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” he wrote in his Truth Social post announcing the nomination.
So that’s that. We know the economy is booming because the dear leader says it is booming. Government data will now reflect the dear leader’s verdict.
Trump is promising that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is now the Ministry of Truth.
He literally said it, out loud.
And how did the markets react to this promise? They shrugged.
As of this writing, the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P are all up.
I’m afraid he’s right. We have always been at war with Oceania.
Krugman makes the point that trying to tell people the economy is good when it’s actually bad doesn’t work. So good luck to Trump on that one.
However:
[T]elling people things are bad even when they’re actually good can work. This is sometimes true when it comes to the economy. It’s definitely true when we’re talking about crime.
In his press conference announcing that he was seizing power in the District of Columbia, Trump declared that
Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.
He forgot to mention deranged bums. Anyway, the media were in general pretty good at pointing out that crime in DC has in fact been falling rapidly. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, violent crime is at a 30-year low. The invaluable Jeff Asher has a chart [above]
As I understand it, there are some technical data issues for 2022. But the basic picture is that DC is safer than it has been since the 1960s. The same is true for the nation as a whole:
He wonders if Trump will get away with this and isn’t sure he won’t. As wrote in the post below, I’m not sure either. He writes:
As you can see from the chart above, there was a truly epic decline in crime from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. Yet throughout that period, according to Gallup, a large majority of Americans said that crime was getting worse. What’s going on?
[…]
One possible answer is that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Maybe official crime numbers are, as Trump would say, RIGGED — although that would be really hard to do with murders, which are kind of hard either to fabricate or to conceal, and have fallen even more than overall crime. Or maybe people’s lived experience just doesn’t match what the crime data say.
But I don’t buy that explanation, among other things because I’m a New Yorker. Much of the nation sees the Big Apple as a dystopian hellhole, but anyone who actually lives there can tell you that the city feels quite safe — certainly safer than at any earlier point in my adult life.
He notes that the subway ridership numbers bear this out despite the fact that all the Trumpers insist that the NY subways are highways to hell. He continues:
Part of the answer is the old line “if it bleeds it leads.” There are occasional acts of violence on the New York subway, and they make the news. The system’s overall safety — taking the subway is much, much safer than driving — doesn’t.
But I’d also argue that a large part of the answer is that many Americans believe that crime is running rampant — just not where they happen to live. Fox News tells suburban and small-town Americans that New York and Los Angeles are crime-ridden hellscapes, and they believe it.
According to Gallup, last year 56 percent of Americans believed that crime in the United States was an extremely or very serious problem — but only 14 percent said it was an extremely or very serious problem “in the area where you live.”
Krugman points out that this tracks with what happened with the economy during the Biden years when people all said they were doing fine but thought the rest of the country was in a recession. It’s apparently a common phenomenon and I personally hold the media as responsible as Trump.
Krugman notes that we can’t take it for granted that the people who don’t live in DC will understand that Trump is just lying when he says it’s a dystopian nightmare:
And if I may say, it’s the responsibility of the news media to make that clear. Don’t say “Trump makes contentious claims about DC crime.” Don’t say that there’s “dispute over DC crime data.” Just say that he’s lying.
Yep. Stop talking about the vibes and report the facts. And the fact is that he’s lying.
“I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden so interested in the Epstein files,” Vance said in an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “For four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did absolutely nothing about this story. We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires. And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him, and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.”
Vance is only making the case for releasing the Epstein files stronger.
Trump has of course not been demanding “full transparency.” His administration has instead flipped its position on releasing all the Epstein-related documents it once claimed it had.On top of that, Vance’s timeline is off. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 — when Trump was president. Trump, not Biden, had the first opportunity to obtain and share new information about Epstein’s death and his social circles. And it was Trump’s Department of Justice that gave Epstein a so-called “sweetheart deal.”
But on top of that, Vance is only making the case for releasing the Epstein files stronger. He’s saying Democrats have more to fear because Epstein had well-documented social connections to liberals, including former President Bill Clinton. Well, that’s precisely why so many Trump supporters want to see the files.
This is a very good question. We know there will be Democrats named in the files. (Even former Senator George Mitchell is among them…) We know Bill Clinton travelled on the plane to Africa three times and who knows what else? There are probably many more. Who cares? If they were involved in trafficking underage girls then they deserve to be exposed.
Considering Trump’s vengeance policy already in place against Comey, Brennan, Schiff, Letitia James and others, I think it’s more than fair to grill all of these slimey Republicans as to why, if Trump is so innocent, he isn’t ordering the files to be released. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?
I’m on a little break (as is Tom, which you can see below, LOL…) so I missed the fact that it was an assault on infamous DOGE staffer “Big Balls” that precipitated Trump’s militarization order of Washington DC. Doesn’t that just figure.
Not that this is unprecedented. After all, Trump militarized Los Angeles in June and the country shrugged. Here’s Bill Kristol, unreconstructed cold warrior, observing that his worst fears are coming true:
It’s a familiar headline for Americans of my generation: “Authoritarian Government Uses Pretext to Take Control of Police Force in Nation’s Capital.” The dateline could be Belgrade or Bangkok, Caracas or Cairo. We’d read the stories, shake our heads, and reflect on the fragility of democracy in the Third World. We might have taken a moment to think: “It can’t happen here.” But the truth is that the possibility of it happening here seemed so remote that the thought barely came to mind in the first place.
We did, of course, know that it had happened in counties more like us in the first half of the last century, in European capitals like Rome and Berlin and Madrid, and Prague and Budapest and Warsaw. But that was a long time ago. That couldn’t happen here. It couldn’t happen now.
And then, yesterday, the president of the United States announced the following:
Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, and placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control. . . . In addition, I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order, and public safety in Washington DC, and they’re going to be allowed to do their job properly.
The president claimed an emergency existed in the District of Columbia even though crime is down a lot over the last two years—and especially over the last two decades. He announced it even though other cities in the United States have higher rates of violent crime. A failed carjacking incident at 3:00 a.m. one night a week ago—an incident that, it must be noted, was stopped by the D.C. police and that resulted in the arrest of two of the perpetrators—was the pretext for the president’s actions. It also must be noted that it’s unclear what the legitimate “federal purpose” of the president’s action is, which is what the statute requires.
I heard Joe Scarborough go on and on and on this morning about how the Democrats have to take this seriously and come up with some (assuredly draconian) solutions because people don’t “feel” safe. In other words, “vibes.”
This is how we got here. The right ginned up the vibes about inflation, the media pimped it hard and people began to “feel” it. Here we go again. Whether it’s caravans coming for the border, inflation or crime, this is patented Trump bullshit which the media fall for every single time.
Trump has wanted a militarized federal takeover of American cities for decades. Just look at that op-ed at the top from 1987. Now it’s YOLO and he’s going for it.
Visitors to Las Vegas overall dropped 11.3% in June 2025, compared to the same month last year. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, international visitors to one of the world’s largest tourist destinations dropped 13% in June.
“A lot of departments are having a lot of layoffs,” said Norma Torres, a housekeeper for eight years at Mandalay Bay and a member of the Culinary Union, who has worked in the hospitality industry since she was 18 years old. “In the housekeeping department, the people on call are barely called into work.”
Canada is Nevada’s largest international market. Flair Airlines, a Canadian airline, reported a 55% drop in passengers compared to last year. Air Canada reported a 13.2% drop in passengers from May to June this year to Las Vegas, and one third lower compared to last year.
[…]
“If you tell the rest of the world you’re not welcome, they are going to listen. Our members are telling us that they’re quite nervous, and that’s why they’re calling it a Trump slump,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary treasurer of Culinary Workers Union Local 226.
“You have Canadians that have said, ‘We’re going to go elsewhere.’ Some of our best customers are Mexican tourists. But the biggest one is southern California and visitation is down because they’re nervous about raids, the tariffs, the economy riled up,” added Pappageorge. “The way these kind of chaotic immigration policies have been handled have a direct impact, we think, on what’s happening with this slowdown in Las Vegas and our members are quite concerned.”
There are many fun, nice places to vacation in this world. The U.S. is not one of them anymore. I can’t imagine why people would want to come here.
Krugman told the Daily Beast he is “flattered” by the attention from Trump. “He must think people are listening,” Krugman added. “I might add ‘Deranged BUM’ to my profile.”
Trump didn’t specify exactly what about Krugman, an economist at the City University of New York, set him off, probably because there are plenty of recent possibilities to pick from.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Krugman blasted Trump for instantly dismissing accurate jobs data the moment it turned negative. “If you actually know anything about how they [jobs reports] are put together, it would require basically hundreds, if not thousands, of people to be in on the conspiracy,” Krugman said. “This is just silly stuff, and it’s clear that if Trump sees a number or a fact he doesn’t like, he claims that it’s a conspiracy against him.”
“We’re definitely seeing a slowdown in the economy. Whether it actually crosses the line into a recession is less clear, but… it’s going to feel pretty bad,” he told NPR.
In his Aug. 5 Substack newsletter, Krugman condemned Trump for firing Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency reported the U.S. added only 73,000 jobs in July, far below expectations. Without offering evidence, Trump called the damning report “rigged” and politically motivated.
“Claiming that economic data you don’t like is fraud perpetrated by a deep state conspiracy has been standard practice on the right for a long time, going back to the ‘inflation truthers’ of the Obama years,” Krugman wrote.
Jealousy might also be fueling Trump’s fixation on Krugman. The president has repeatedly stated he wants and even deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and has been put forward for the prestigious honor several times. His trade adviser, Peter Navarro, has even floated the idea that Trump’s tariff strategy warrants a Nobel Prize for economics, the same honor Krugman won in 2008 for his work on trade theory and new economic geography.
Yeah, when hell freezes over. I suspect that if the Nobel committee does decide to bend the knee as so many other institutions have done, we will immediately see many of the Laureates give back their medals. It will certainly lose whatever cache and credibility it has. And considering that they gave it to Henry Kissinger, that’s saying something.
Although the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the Presidency has become commonplace, nobody could tell me how much he’s made. Norm Eisen, a government-ethics lawyer and a vocal Trump critic, said, “We don’t know the full amounts.” Robert Weissman, a co-president of the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen, said, “We will never really know.” Wertheimer noted that for decades Trump had boasted constantly, and in detail, about how rich he was. “He doesn’t talk about it anymore,” Wertheimer said. “He may be the greatest con artist in American history.”
A more considered accounting seemed in order. I decided to attempt to tally up just how much Trump and his immediate family have pocketed off his time in the White House.
He makes the case that Trump isn’t (yet) a true oligarch in the classic sense of the word, offering up a number of examples of those who simply drain the national treasury into their personal coffers. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t exploiting his position for maximum benefit:
Personal self-enrichment is where Trump is a true innovator, and his winnings in that category are also harder to quantify. On his tax returns, Trump has aggressively minimized the value of his assets and maximized the extent of his losses. On loan applications, he’s done the opposite, puffing up his wealth to borrow as much as possible. And on the financial-disclosure forms he’s been required to file as a candidate or as President, he usually provides only a business’s gross revenue, not its bottom line, thus reporting tens of millions of dollars in “income” from hotels that are actually losing money.
Bruce Dubinsky, a forensic accountant who testified in the fraud trial of Bernie Madoff and investigated the collapse of Lehman Brothers as a part of its bankruptcy, closely followed Trump’s New York fraud trial. Dubinsky told me that the opaque ownership structure of the Trump businesses makes it difficult to assess changes in his net worth. It’s similarly hard to isolate his Presidential profits, in part because estimating how much his businesses might have made if he weren’t President would require detailed comparisons with similar enterprises that have non-Presidential owners. By way of example, Dubinsky, who lives in Florida, noted that he’d recently visited the Trump golf course in Jupiter, “just to play golf.” He added, “So how much value to assign to his status as President is a daunting task.”
He looks at Mar-a-lago, Trump merch and legal fees, the D.C. hotel, middle eastern “deals”, the private jet, Trump Hotel Hanoi, the “corporate squeeze”, Truth Social, 1789 Capital, and his crypto schemes. The running total? $3.4 billion.
Read the whole thing in detail if you can to see how vast his corruption truly is. It’s mind-boggling.
He’s actually going to Alaska but I suppose there’s a good chance that he’ll throw that state in along with all the Ukraine territories he’s planning to give to his BFF Vlad. After all, Ukraine started the war:
Trump: "I get along with Zelenskyy, but I disagree w/ what he's done. Severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened…I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, 'I have to get constitutional approval.' I mean, he's got approval to go into war & kill everybody"
I recall visiting Franco’s Spain when I was very young and seeing armed soldiers all over Madrid and thinking how sad and weird it was that such a beautiful city was under martial law. Looks like we’re going to be experiencing that here from now on.
"You knock the hell out of them. It's the only language they understand … you spit and we hit. And they get hit real hard … now they are allowed to do whatever they want" — Trump on the police response to crime in DC
His rambling press conference today was one of his most grotesque performances in a while. He’s always very stimulated when he shares violent lurid anecdotes about crime in the streets. He is very, very, very excited about sending in troops to patrol America’s capitol city. In fact, I think he’s going to need a cigarette and a diet coke when this thing is over. Which, as I write this, looks to be concluded sometime next week. He’s on a roll.
