Since we wrote our Monday post on E.J. Antoni being nominated as commissioner of the BLS and as an example of an unqualified person being picked by an incompetent person who thinks they are smart, there has been a flood of economists critical of his qualifications. In that post we shared a video, via the economist Lars P. Syll, which explained why incompetent people think they are smart which has been named the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Economists are very concerned about this appointment, because the economic data produced by the BLS is internationally recognized as a gold standard of credible economic data used by business, economists, and government to make vital decisions as we wrote in a post on August 2nd. The Antoni appointment and President Trump's refusal to accept real world data directly threatens the credibility of US government data and the international credibility of the United States government.
Among other economists, Paul Krugman has added his voice in a Substack post and used a quotation from Hannah Arendt's book on Totalitarianism to formulate what he calls "Arendt’s Law: Totalitarian and wannabe totalitarian regimes only hire incompetent hacks." Krugman's Arendt's Law could very well be a subatantive corollary to the Dunnung-Kruger Effect.
Trump has attacked the Federal Reserve, Law Firms, Judges, Universities, governmental cultural institutions, private sector economists, and corporate CEOs as well as militarily occupied US cities. He has no intention of stopping until he controls what we see, hear, learn, say, and do and will tolerate no questioning much less resistance to his chaos tariffs economic march towards failed state authoritarianism.
Just as he will not accept jobs data, he will not accept CPI showing the beginning of tariff cost pass through to consumers from businesses, which is why he demanded Goldman Sachs fire their economist for a report that two-thirds of the cost of tariffs will pass to consumers by the end of this year indicating a year end inflation rate of 3.2%.
When challenged or threatened, Trump provokes and diverts attention as he has done with the Epstein Files Diversionary Occupation of Washington, DC, which he today said he will continue with or without Congressional approval after thirty days as required by law. Federal law enforcement and the National Guard will not find the over 300 gigabytes of Epstein files on the streets of Washington, DC, when they are in the DOJ ready to be released with victim names only redacted at the snap of a finger ---which will never come. What is in the DOJ Epstein pedophilia files which makes Trump too afraid to release them? If he is only casually mentioned several times with no indication of knowledge or involvement, what does he have to fear?
Trump's Epstein files diversion and how it fits in his cascading deconstruction of American constitutional government, rule by law, and history has been noted by the American historian Heather Cox Richardson.
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