MaddowBlog-E.J. Antoni's failed nomination makes the White House look even more incompetent [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

It’s not often that Senate Republicans muster the courage to tell Donald Trump and his team, “Whoa, hold on, we can’t go that far.”

It takes an awful lot for Senate Republicans to reject a Trump nominee — but E.J. Antoni was that bad.

The fiasco makes the White House’s incompetence even more obvious. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-10-01T14:03:41.405Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/ej-antonis-failed-nomination-makes-white-house-look-even-incompetent-rcna234896

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.

.....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......

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 is the asshole who had a large picture of the Bismark in his office. I am mildly surprised that trump had to withdraw this nomination