Bulwark: The Ministry of Truth is Real Now
E.J. Antoni’s nomination isn’t designed to reassure markets, the Fed, or the business community. It’s designed to provoke them. And force them to submit.
By Jonathan V. Last The Bulwark
1. n00b. Two weeks ago the federal government released jobs data for July and it was bad so the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is absolutely a thing that happens in first-world governments.
On Monday, the president announced his nominee for this post. The gentleman’s name is E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist at the Heritage Foundation. Let me share his credentials with you:
That’s it. That’s the full CV.¹ He wrote some pieces for Townhall, Breitbart, and the Federalist, went on Fox News, and now he’ll be running an organization of 2,000 economic specialists.²
I know what you’re thinking: How droll. What an embarrassment. This is preposterous.
But I’m here to tell you that this is not preposterous, at all. It’s sinister.
Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s waging war on the very idea of truth. And he’s winning.
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
Then 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.
2. Sinister. Which brings us to the sinister part.
Yesterday Damon Linker had a profound observation about Trump’s view of the political battlespace. You should read his whole essay but the gist of it is this:
Trump’s political project is centered on excising objective reality—so that power flows not upwards, in response to facts, but only downwards, as an emanation from the strongman. Here’s Damon:
In that kind of politics, no one is neutral, no one is objective. There is just what we say and what they say, what our friends say and what our enemies say.
This view of politics recurs throughout history, in nearly every authoritarian regime: The wheat harvests have exceeded Comrade Stalin’s plans. There is no inflation, Señora Presidenta. If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases of COVID.
The economy is booming and the job numbers will now reflect that.
At heart, this is a battle for dominance. Trump is wagering that he can force reality to submit to his will.
I don’t mean reality reality, though. I mean political reality. Trump believes that he can create a dynamic in which voters become indifferent to reality reality. Unemployment may rise. Prices may increase. But these inputs are no longer salient to their political preferences. They have been trained to believe only what the strongman says.
Two observations:
(1) This wager is smarter than it might seem. Trump doesn’t need to hold the support of 60 percent of the country. Minority rule is a real thing. And when you have the military in the streets, you don’t even need substantial minority support. You just need to control the levers of power.
(2) These are not the sorts of moves a man makes if he intends to leave office in three years.
3. Gobbledygook. Because it was in the footnotes, you may not have clicked on the link to Antoni’s dissertation. I want you to see it with your own eyes. Here’s his introduction:
It is always good practice to begin by defining one’s terminology. Crowding out can mean many things to many economists in different contexts. It can refer to public employment crowding out private employment, public purchases of goods crowding out private purchases, and even taxes for public welfare programs crowding out their private counterpart of donations to charitable organizations. In short, crowding out is the economic theory that the entrance of government activity into the economy can have the effect of excluding some private activity that existed previously. For the purposes of this research, the focus is upon the crowding out of private investment by government deficit spending, with an increase in that public spending causing a rise in interest rates.
According to N. Gregory Mankiw, the crowding out effect takes place not because government borrowing increases the demand for loanable funds, but because it decreases the supply of loanable funds. This is because he defines the loanable funds market as the “flow of resources available to fund private investment.” However, he also acknowledges that under the framework of defining loanable funds as including private and public borrowing together, crowding out would then be an increase in demand as opposed to a decrease in supply. More importantly, the end result on the market remains the same: the interest rate rises. While the equilibrium quantity would clearly change, it is merely a semantic difference since this chapter’s focus is on the interest rate.
Absent any government spending, then, some private individuals will save money while others borrow from them, after agreeing on a price. The price for these loanable funds is the interest rate. Like any price, it conveys an important piece of information, telling individuals how valuable savings are and how costly borrowing is, relative to the alternative uses for their money and time. Prices are of the utmost importance because they are necessary for the economical allocation of scarce resources. Loanable funds are among these scarce resources. This gives credence to the idea that the government must compete in the loanable funds market alongside all others who wish to borrow, including corporations, households, and lower levels of government.
According to the crowding out theory, large amounts of government deficit spending cause the government to borrow more, and this borrowing increases the interest rate on loanable funds. The higher interest rate effectively makes borrowing prohibitively expensive for borrowers near the margin, whose consumer surplus was previously relatively small but is now non-existent as the marginal cost of borrowing rises above their marginal benefit. Those borrowers, therefore, no longer seek loans, and private investment is “crowded out” of the marketplace by government borrowing. The foundational economic principle of scarcity indicates that this effect should be taking place and that the theory is on sound footing.
Read the whole thing. I double-dog dare you. And tell us in the comments if this strikes you as the sort of work that seems worthy of a Ph.D. in economics.
Because I am a jerk, I’m mildly obsessed with Antoni’s CV. Where did he do his undergraduate education? He’s gone to considerable lengths to obscure this part of his past: On LinkedIn he lists Northern Illinois University as his grad school and Lansdale Catholic High School, but between the completion of high school and the start of grad school is a ten-year gap. His biographical squib at the Heritage Foundation, like his bio on the websites of previous employers, says nothing about his undergraduate education.
My colleague Hannah Yoest called the registrar’s office at NIU and got an answer: Antoni apparently did time in a seminary in Pennsylvania before starting his graduate work. (An entry in the for-profit database Radaris would seem to confirm this.) So why does he go out of his way to hide this? Is it because it was a seminary? Or because he’s embarrassed he studied fields other than economics as an undergrad? Or did he not even finish his undergrad degree?
The other reason I ask is that I skimmed his dissertation and . . . holy shit. Even by the standards of bad grad-student writing, it’s subliterate. Go look for yourself.
Pending Senate confirmation, of course. ROFL.
By the by, this move is also part of the Project 2025 playbook:
The plan would consolidate The Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics into a single office, would “align [their] mission with conservative principles,” and urges a second Trump Administration “maximize hiring of political appointees” in statistical positions.
Jonathan V. Last is editor of The Bulwark and writes “The Triad” daily newsletter. Subscribe to their podcasts, videos and newsletters here.
Image: Big Brother from “1984” (1984), True Myth Media.