Bulwark Takes - Trump’s BLS Pick Is a Total Clown Show

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Nazi imagery, extremist politics, and a January 6 cameo. Tim Miller and Bill Kristol expose the troubling record of Trump’s new BLS nominee and the risk he poses to inflation, jobs, and social security.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the bulwark here. We got a bonus Tim and Bill Crystal segment this week. We had a little extra time this morning. And any time that there's news about a Trump administration sycophant seeming to have a Nazi fetish,

I got to pull in Bill Crystal to talk about that. So we have a few news items with this guy, E.J. and Tony, if you're following this feed, you know who we're talking about. He's the person that Trump has put in to replace the old Commissioner of Labor Statistics. he's a total hack every credible economist has been trashing him we have a few stories about him today the nazi fetish and then we've got he was there on january 6th then we have some pretty bad economic news bill um is this news since we talked on monday did we talk about ej when we were i don't think it'd be announced yet i think it seems like time flies when you're having fun wasn't the

bLS commissioner just fired it was a week ago right it was like yeah it was just a week ago yeah for the The next couple of days, there was a certain amount of, well, the deputy commissioner is taking over. And so let's see, you know, and the place kind of rides itself and let's see what happens. Then I remember reading like a day or two into it, it was Sunday-ish, you know, well, this is this guy on Tony at Heritage. I mean, he's a real kook and Bannon loves him. And, I mean, he's the kind of the right-wing candidate for the job. But, I mean, he's probably not going to get the job.

I mean, Scott Bessent and those guys won't allow that, you know. And then, like, Tuesday morning, he's announced. And by Wednesday afternoon, it's like, you'll probably get through the Senate, you know. I was like, yeah, I mean, so it's a very good illustration, though, of the normalization of everything, right? I mean, the stuff that seems impossible, A, that he would fire the guy, the woman who's been there and who's doing a perfectly competent job, apparently, and B, that, and then it gets taken a little seriously, well, there were problems with statistics, those revisions

are pretty good. And then there's a wacko guy who's mentioned, but that's not going to happen. Then the wacko guy's nominated, but, man, probably won't be confirmed. Now he's going to be, maybe we'll be confirmed. So I think the degree, the rapidity with which the frogs are. boiling in the water or whatever the metaphor. Yeah, the Overton window moves very fast. What becomes ridiculous becomes inevitable quite quickly. Well, just a couple. So we have these two stories as teased. You know, sometimes you can decide how much you want to make of this.

But, you know, we have this guy who is just a total Trump toady. And he was doing a podcast with Benny Johnson, who's an insane person and a hack and was on the take from Russia. And behind him is this big mural kind of, of a German battleship, the Bismarck, named after Otto von Bismarck, that was launched by the Nazis in the late 1930s to attack the U.S. and the Allies. Are you a ship, are you interested in big ships, Bill? Was that part of your history? I'm not a big shipman. I'm not a ship guy, but I read up, you know, and I'll find out that, yeah, huge hoopla,

Hitler personally announced in the 39, kind of overrated and oversold, destroyed by the World Navy in 40s in nine months, I think. in 1941 so that's a good thing but so it's a famous ship on the one hand they're like movies about it and it was dug up wasn't it and and they found the you know they it was like that with movies about that on you know the history channel and so forth so on the one hand you could say well he's a ship enthusiast and this is what are several ships he has in his office or whatever that is that he's video casting from and i suppose you could explain it away on the end it is the most prominent one it's right behind him and it was sort of famously a nazi talking point right

I mean, Hitler did, it was like a thing, you know, when they, when they launched it. This is the biggest and best ship ever. It's bullshit like that. Yeah, it's kind of like having a mural of like a failed Confederate general like Pemberton behind you or something. It's sort of like, well, why would you choose that? I mean, I guess there is a famous ship. It's a famous ship, sure. But as you mentioned, it was, it failed.

And it was Nazi. It was the Nazis. So if you really just were impressed by, you know, big ship. and the naval history does feel like you'd choose something else. So anyway, if it was a total one-off, if it was kind of a mainstream person who, you know, a serious person who happens to have the German ship behind them, you might think, okay, well, it's a little strange, but, but, you know, when it's, when you get a series of data points, it does raise some eyebrows.

Data point two, Ryan Riley, great reporter over at NBC. We've had him on the channel a few times. So he spotted Antony on January 6. And the images put out by the January 6th select committee of the crowd. He was there. It seems like both of the West and the East Side at various times. I'm going to put this picture up here. We'll put this picture up.

The White House says he was a bystander and that he was leaving. If you look at this picture, he's turned as if he's leaving, but he's deep in there. I mean, it's not like he was over by the Washington Monument. and you're quite deep towards the capital in the red garb, you know, again, didn't breach the capital, but it seems like a pretty poor judgment call in line with the Nazi ship. Right. You know, just one thing on the Genres, on the Nazi battleship, which I hadn't, like, focused on. Heritage is very involved at all this, you know, we have to be writing American history, right?

They're cousins. A lot of their people are close to that movement. Smithsonian can't show anything divisive or, or, or, derogatory and it's all going to be edifying upbeat, you know, 50s vision of America's success. Yeah. And so it feels a little funny that this guy from Heritage is sitting there with that maybe tells you a little bit about it. I mean, the obvious thing if you're at Heritage, I know people at Heritage, you and I've

known over the years, even in the old days, Heritage is this way. You'd have the big American flag. You'd have the big American ship. You'd have the big American success story. You'd have, you know, the planes, whatever, right? It would be very Americana-ish. I don't think the Bismarck is very American. cottage. It is noteworthy. Yeah. They're trying to, you know, no, we don't want to, you know,

advance any history about, like, look, we're changing ship names, right? Like, we don't want the Harvey Milk on the ship. You know, we don't want Harvey Milk's name on one of our ships because, you know, that Harvey Milk's a gay and a mayor and there's controversy. Like, we're going to focus more on American strength. So it's noteworthy. You know, we got to take Harvey off of our ship. But meanwhile, we can honor and put in a place of prestige to the Nazi Bismarck. Anyway, right back to january 6th he's there you know again it's one of these things where it's like if it's one thing okay but uh you know he is he's fudging numbers for trump on social media um he doesn't seem to understand basic some basic economic facts based on you know what

some of our friends jason firman of others have observed of his of his publications um he he's there on january 6 not really like an economist saying like our boy stan voyger over at I don't think he was there mixing and mingling on January 6th. You know, it wasn't really a pencil head crowd there on January 6th. It's alarming, I guess I would say. I mean, we sort of know what we already need to from his public tweets, but it's not nothing. I said to someone last night at this point, it's kind of altogether, I'm totally unqualified, a kind of joke of an economist, total Trump sycophant, January 6th, the Bismarck thing behind him.

It's like, I don't know. And maybe the Senate would draw the line there. And it was like, well, they did confirm Pete Hick-Seth and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from higher-level jobs and many others. Piero. Yeah, Janine Piero. So I don't know. Again, it gets back to the original point about the normalization and the

what's ridiculous becomes. That was a good formulation you had. What was that? What's ridiculous becomes inevitable. I mean, the administration is both more clownish and much more extremist than I think even, I don't know, even I have trouble coming. to go so that you know what i mean you sort of think at some level down it's going to be you know not people we you and i would agree with or admire very much but semi-normal just right-wingers you know

doing their right-wing thing we're in pretty we're in pretty extreme waters there even for today's right wing yeah we're in weird out turf um and this is we're both obsessed with us so we we don't need to spend too much time about it but i don't when you think about the senate confirmation as the senate conformal position you know there's always the focus on the people that have been the main dissenters. Markowski, Collins, at times McConnell, at times Tillis, because he's now leaving the Senate, all the discussion. I just, because of the news of Sherrod Brown running for Senate, it just had me kind of rethinking of some of the other senators that just kind of have faded into the background. Like John Houston, who's now the senator, who took J.D. Vance's

slot, who was like, I think Secretary of State or, I forget, one of those state level offices in Ohio was in the mainstream Republican world. his whole career, you know, Dave McCormick, who I mentioned, Mike Rounds. Like, there are all these, there's still remaining a bunch of senators from the pre-Trump Times who, you know, you would think I might have one, some issue with something. Like so, and, and yet there's not really even any hope, I don't think, that any of them will draw the line here. You think there's some, how about you?

You think there's a little hope? No, I always say, I try to keep hope alive. And then, of course, yeah. Then it gets to ash. We shouldn't give up. We shouldn't give up. No, it is bad. Instead, speaking of, so to go outside the Senate for a second, same point in a way you're making

just a different angle, these business groups that have been totally pathetic and haven't objected to anything and are busy sucking up to Trump and so forth. I remember Obama was a socialist. Obama goes the end of the free market economy for a lot of these groups. This is actually, though, it's one thing where they don't care about unless they're a farmer about Kennedy and they don't care about HECSeth, they don't do defense, you know, blah, blah, but this is like a business-oriented position, if you want to. I mean, like, they all have chief economists at Goldman and elsewhere who think this guy's a total clown.

Will any of them, like, speak up and say, you know, it'd be kind of good to have someone we sort of, our economists could sort of talk to as a grown-up. They're over there at BLS, you know. Yeah. Or pressure of the senators, you know, again, like back in our day, and we were doing this, like, there were these campaigns and we get business groups together and, you know, they'd be out of, you know, you get ideological groups, everybody worked together and you pride of pressure senators, don't vote for so-and-so. So you're not even seeing that anymore. Okay, to why this really matters just substantively. In addition to the jobs numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also measures inflation and Social Security is pegged to inflation.

So there's a bunch of elements of this where the investing community matters to them. And as you mentioned, the business community, they want good numbers. But even just for any senior, right, if inflation is going up, the Bureau of Labor labor statistics assess is what that is and then there's you know you get a little bit of an uptick and your social security to match the uptick and inflation um if they want to pretend like inflation isn't happening um then maybe the seniors won't get there that uptick uh and we have the news out today which is the producer price index which is uh up three percent up much higher than expected the nerds i follow on on social media are like wow the pb i's on fire for people who don't know what that is

the producer price index is a measure of wholesale inflation, so like business to business, CPI, which people hear more about is consumer, like the price of consumers pay. So you're not necessarily seeing this in what you're paying at the store right now. But a lot of times the PPI, like, precedes the CPI, right? Because businesses start paying more for their wholesale and then eventually, you know, they pass that price on to consumers. So, you know, we have this guy coming in who said that he's not going to put out jobs numbers. I don't think it's crazy to think that they will F with inflation numbers.

I totally agree. And the same people who sort of said, okay, we're a little understandably, well, this guy can't possibly get appointed or now saying, well, you know, there are 1,000 economists, there are 200 or something. And they can't just, they're going to produce a real number and he can't just overrule them. I mean, it would be like two of them would quit and they'd be bad press for a day or two. And I feel like that's one of those things that everyone's going to say until he does it in, you know, at a time when it's politically important in September of 2026 or something like that. And, of course, they'll go ahead and do it, and Trump will say that it was right to do it, and there'll be a day of bad press, and then it will be done. And, no, so I'm people are right to be alarmed about this. And, again, I just come back to this, Kennedy, well, he wouldn't go to do the things that, you know, he'd been irresponsible when he was just a private citizen.

But as cabinet secretary, he wasn't going to actually stop life-saving vaccines. I mean, come on, you know. It's like, so, I mean, again, I think the degree to which we just underrate the momentum of the authority. authoritarianism, and the real deep-down extremism, and that does get a little back to the Bismarck and so forth in January 6th. We are not putting in, as I say, heritage right-wing ideologues at this point, you know, Steve Moore, someone we do in the old day who's gone totally Trumpy and cudlow, those types, right? I mean, it's, it's, we're way beyond that. The extremism is really real, I guess is what I'm struck by looking at this guy, you know,

fanaticism, really, right? And which means that the normal incentives, the normal way can't do that, but it'd be embarrassing for him. him, among other economists, couldn't care less. Couldn't care less. All right, Bill Crystal, I appreciate the extra time with you this week. I'll keep you on the bat phone. If there's more World War II Nazi paraphernalia in the administration, everybody else subscribed to the feed.

I've got a guest coming up on today's podcast. We're doing a lot of the Russia stuff. And we've got a couple more fun things for you, too. So stick around. We'll see soon.