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After firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last week because she had the audacity to deliver Donald Trump the bad news that job growth over the past three months was woeful, the president quickly found the perfect replacement.

Sure, at first glance, E.J. Antoni doesn’t appear to be a good candidate for the job because he seems to be incompetent and an idealogue, which isn’t a great combination of traits for someone who is supposed to run an apolitical agency of experts.

By the way, don’t take our word for it.

Here is Dave Hebert of the libertarian American Institute for Economic Research (who, by the way, wrote an excellent and illustrative essay explaining BLS’s work and why the revisions Republicans pretend to be upset about are actually fairly minor):

.@RealEJAntoni nominated to head up the BLS. I've been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he's gone MAGA.

I can only hope the Senate blocks this.

— Dave Hebert (@Dave_Hebert) August 11, 2025

As for the MAGA part, the White House acknowledged on Wednesday that Antoni was a “bystander” on January 6. He was in town for meetings and just happened to find himself in the mob outside of the Capitol before it stormed the building.

We’ll let the experts determine the degree of his incompetence.

In any case, we believe these traits make him the perfect candidate not only to satisfy Trump but also those opposing him.

Here is why: For the president, Antoni is an excellent pick because he seems to understand that the first priority of every government official in this administration is to please the boss. In this case, that might mean suspending monthly jobs reports for a while or fudging the numbers a little.

Obviously, that would not be necessary if the economy were entering a golden age.

However, those are just the kind of things a BLS commissioner may feel compelled to do if the president wants Americans to believe that everything is going great when the economy is actually doing poorly and only creating, for example, 106,000 jobs over three months.

This would be especially true if that same president had previously said that a monthly job growth of 250,000 should be “almost automatic.”

In that case, a BLS commissioner of dubious competence but unquestioned loyalty would come in handy.

That explains why Trump chose Antoni, but why is he a good pick for everybody else?

That’s simple.

As we have noted, it should be assumed at this point that everybody in this administration from the president on down is lying.

That doesn’t mean that they always are lying, but it should be the default assumption that, every time you hear Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, or any cabinet official say anything, it is not the (whole) truth.

It helps when this is abundantly clear, which is why Antoni is a great candidate for the nation because he has zero credibility.

There is no reason to believe anything that a guy says who just so happened to be in the January 6 mob, and who only has the job because the respected civil servant who held it previously was fired for overseeing an agency that delivered news Trump didn’t want to hear.

Yes, there are those who believe that Antoni should not be confirmed because of his incompetence and that January 6 thing, but we strongly disagree.

Because anybody Trump nominates for this job should be viewed with great suspicion (and will probably be asked to sugarcoat the truth a little), so it might as well be in the open from the start that the new BLS commissioner cannot be trusted to provide Americans with an accurate picture of the nation’s employment situation.

And that is why we believe that Antoni should be confirmed… because we already know that he will do a poor job.

So poor, in fact, that maybe everybody will realize it.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.