Trump's New Pick for a Key Economic Role Really Does Not Inspire Confidence

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Hello! And welcome back to the Surge, the world's first seven-item newsletter about people whose jobs have some sort of connection to the city of Washington and/or the District of Columbia. I'm Ben Mathis-Lilley, still filling in for Jim Newell; Jim has taken the summer off to join one of those trendy goofball baseball teams , for whom he serves as a situational right-handed relief pitcher who falls into a pile of horse manure at least once a game. And you think your dry-cleaning bills are bad!

This week, a man named “Big Balls” triggered a military invasion, the government explained somewhat unpersuasively why he decided not to cure cancer, and Chuck Schumer racked up another big-time Chuck Schumer dub. (Chuck Schumer stays winning!) But first, let's talk about the random guy from C-list right-wing media who looks like a member of Korn and has been assigned to ruin the world economy.

EJ Antoni

Donald Trump had a problem: The bill for the enormous tariffs he has unilaterally imposed on scores of foreign countries was starting to come due in the form of higher prices for consumers andrising unemployment . And after thinking on it for a few minutes, the irrepressible Mr. Trump landed on a solution: He would fire the person in charge of economic data (ie, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and replace her with someone who was willing to say every month that things are going great regardless of what the numbers show. That person, the president announced this week, should be EJ Antoni, a 37-year-old who only earned his Ph.D. five years ago and has no professional credentials to speak of but does appear frequently on MAGA media king Steve Bannon's podcast to praise the president. (It's neither here nor there, but he also has the angular widow's peak and goatee of a '90s rap-rock bassist.)

Antoni's most notable recent economic proposal, it turns out, was to suspend the issuance of monthly employment reports , something that even Trump-friendly conservative economists like Stephen Moore identified as a bad idea that would make it difficult for businesses and banks to do a little something called “planning for the future.” Meanwhile, photos surfaced of Antoni giving previous interviews in front of a big painting of a Nazi battleship . (“The markets” did not ultimately fare that well under the National Socialists, for the record, with the Allied air forces' destruction of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange putting a point on things in 1944.) His position requires Senate confirmation, which is usually pretty easy to obtain these days. Buckle up!

Vladimir Putin

Like any good diplomat, President Trump changes his opinion on who he wants to win the Ukraine–Russia war based on which country's head of state he perceives as a greater threat to his ego at any given moment . At this moment, Vladimir Putin and Trump are on the outs because Trump, who wants to get credit for negotiating a peace settlement, has gradually realized that Putin has been playing him for a chump to kill time while he attempts to conquer as much of Ukraine as possible . Thus, ahead of Friday's summit with the Russian leader in Alaska, Trump was telling whoever would listen that he wanted both sides in the conflict to agree to an immediate ceasefire that would not require the ceding of any Ukrainian territory, and he was backing up that position with threats to impose further sanctions on Russia that other foreign leaders, at least, seemed to be taking seriously . Trump is famous, though, for agreeing fully with the last person he talked to ; Putin once mesmerized him so thoroughly at a one-on-one meeting that Trump took Russia's side against the United States itself at the ensuing press conference. As of the time we had to wrap this newsletter, Trump had greeted Putin byclapping for him as he disembarked his airplane, so make of that carry what you will.

Big Balls

Remember Edward “Big Balls” Coristine? He's a very young Trump administration staffer, initially brought on by Elon Musk's DOGE operation, who appeared to follow several racist and super-duper antisemitic Twitter/X accounts and was previously active in an online hacker community known for harassment, extortion, and doxing. (He has not been accused of any crime.) Over a week ago, Coristine was injured in what he says was an altercation resulting from an alleged 3 am carjacking attempt , an incident that President Trump is now citing as one of the main reasons for ordering the deployment of the National Guard and hundreds of federal law enforcement officers to the nation's capital. This, the White House says, will eliminate street crime and also, somehow, homelessness . We'll see! (It won't.) (Also, crime in Washington recently hit a 30-year-old and is not particularly concentrated in the public spaces that Trump claims are a problem .)

Chuck Schumer

The news for Democrats these days is usually not a lot of fun. It's hard to be in the minority in Congress when the majority enforces total loyalty to the president and the Supreme Court is basically allowed to take snatches from the president's top donors . But the good news this week for the donkeys was twofold. One, they proved they still know how to throw a hell of a top-dollar fundraising party, assembling their most well-heeled supporters at a luxury hotel in California wine country for a discussion of how to communicate with blue-collar working-class voters. ( I am not making that part up ; they really did hold their seminar on how to talk to regular people at a luxury wine resort.) Two, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer secured a commitment from former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, someone who really does have a history of winning working-class votes , to run for the chamber again in 2026. Brown lost a reelection race in 2024 to Sen. Bernie Moreno, but this time he'll be competing for the state's other seat, which JD Vance vacated to take the vice presidency. It's currently held by a relatively low-profile state party figure named Jon Husted; two years ago, Brown finished 2.5 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris , so the hope is that in a better environment for Democrats, he'll be able to make the flip. If he can do that , and former Gov. Roy Cooper—whose entry into North Carolina's Senate contest was another recruiting “win” for Dems—can hold on to his own early lead , he would go a long way toward helping secure control of the chamber .

Jay Bhattacharya

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services canceled hundreds of millions of dollars of research into so-called mRNA vaccines. These vaccines use RNA genetic-coding molecules to trigger the human body to manufacture specific types of proteins found in viruses like COVID-19; the body then generates antibodies against those proteins, which helps make for a more effective immune response if and when it encounters the actual virus in question. In his announcement of the policy, HHS secretary and vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that mRNA immunology is not “safe” or “effective,” which was not a claim that any actual medical specialists agreed with . (The approach, researchers say, even has the potential to protect against diseases like HIV and cancer .) In response, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, who is a doctor, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post published Tuesday in which he called mRNA vaccines an “elegant” and “promising” technology, described the COVID mRNA vaccine as the triumphant fruit of a “very successful” development process, and admitted that it has not caused “mass harm.” The termination of funding for mRNA development, he explained, is actually only necessary because the approach has not earned “public trust”—something for which he blames the Biden administration rather than, you know, the years that both he and his boss have spent telling people that vaccines are dangerous and don't work. There's no shame with some of these people.

Ken Paxton

There is a big fight over “redistricting” going on in politics right now, and frankly, the Surge finds it a bit tedious and dispiriting. First Texas decided to redraw its districts to make them more Republican , then California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would try to retaliate by making his state's districts more Democratic, and now a bunch of other states might get involved too. It's all very obviously not how the Constitution says things are supposed to work , but since it would require mutual deescalation and compromise to get resolved, it's just going to continue getting worse and worse forever. One thing the Surge did get a kick out of, though, was the very colorful and soon-to-be-very-divorced Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's attempt to insert himself into the situation. (Paxton, whose Wikipedia page features a “legal issues” section of considerable length , is trying to earn Trump's endorsement in a primary challenge against GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn.) Having noticed that high-profile former Rep. Beto O'Rourke was raising money for Democratic Texas legislators who've fled the state in a procedural effort to forestall the Republican-friendly gerrymander, Paxton found a friendly judge to enjoin O'Rourke's efforts . Now he's claiming, on the basis of an expansive interpretation of some of O'Rourke's subsequent comments, that O'Rourke is violating the injunction and needs to be put in jail indefinitely . Sure, why not? Let's put Beto O'Rourke in jail for being a Democrat. Let's steal the Declaration of Independence. Let's start a subsistence farm in rural Canada and never check the news again!

Laura Loomer

Laura Loomer is a self-described white nationalist and online personality who once had her accounts deactivated by both Uber and Lyft for complaining that they allow Muslims to work as rideshare drivers . She is also, by virtue of having maintained staunch support for Donald Trump even after Jan. 6 , one of the most influential people in the United States. As an unofficial adviser to the president, she has carte blanche to order the firing of anyone in the executive branch who she deems insufficiently loyal to him. But that's not why she's in the Surge this week! She's in the Surge this week because she sued Bill Maher for suggesting that she might be sleeping with Trump, leading to the release of a deposition transcript that is truly one of the craziest and most foul things we've ever read . It involves, among other things, the phrases “show his dick to someone's daughter,” “all the semen she's swallowed,” “gave President Trump the best blowjob of his life,” “McCarthy's penis must be made out of gold,” “she had roast beef in her pants,” and, most chillingly, “friends with Kid Rock.” Whatever you do, do not click on that deposition and search for the word “infected.” You'll regret it!