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:
Walk with me through the logic chain:
- 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.