President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics operated a since-deleted Twitter account that featured sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump.
E.J. Antoni, a 37-year-old economist for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, posted the comments from approximately 2017 through 2020 under a series of usernames and display names. CNN verified that all of Antoni’s posts came from the same Twitter account and that the posts from the anonymous aliases shared strikingly similar biographical details as Antoni.
An outspoken critic of the nonpartisan BLS, which calculates US job growth and unemployment figures, Antoni is a stout Trump loyalist. NBC News reported and CNN confirmed that he was a “bystander” at the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. There is no evidence he entered the Capitol.
His appointment comes after Trump fired the Biden-appointed BLS commissioner and accused the agency without evidence of corruption after a report showed job growth in May and June was weaker than previously estimated.
Antoni has positioned himself as a watchdog for government accountability in media appearances and Heritage Foundation blog posts. But his own digital trail reveals a pattern of incendiary rhetoric that veered frequently into conspiracy theories and misogyny.
In 2019, the since-deleted account known as “ErwinJohnAntoni” changed its username to “phdofbombsaway.” The account posted at least five sexually suggestive tweets implying that then Sen. Kamala Harris had advanced her career through sexual favors.
Shortly after Harris ended her 2020 presidential campaign, Antoni wrote, “You can’t run a race on your knees,” in response to a tweet of a doctored campaign poster that depicted a sexually explicit image of Harris.
Antoni also referred to Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, as “Miss Piggy.” In February 2020, he retweeted a post titled “Advice For Women: How To Land a Great Guy,” which instructed women to “be in shape,” “grow your hair long,” “be sweet,” “learn to cook,” and “don’t be annoying.” The post concluded: “Angry feminists and simps will try to sabotage you in the comments. Don’t listen to them. Listen to me.”
Wired first reported the existence of the account, detailing Antoni’s posts engaging with conspiracy theories on the 2020 election and Covid-19, and referencing weapons used by Nazi Germany in World War II. After that story was published, Antoni’s cousin, a right-wing podcaster, defended Antoni in a social media post, saying the family was proud their grandfather had fought for the US in World War II.
In a statement, the White House defended Antoni and did not address whether he still holds beliefs he espoused on the account.
“President Trump has nominated Dr. EJ Antoni to fix the issues at the BLS and restore trust in the jobs reports. Dr. Antoni has the experience and credentials needed to restore solution-oriented leadership at the BLS — solutions that will prioritize increasing survey response rates and modernizing data collection methods to improve the BLS’s accuracy,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson.
Trump’s decision on August 1 to fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer drew criticism from economists who warned that politicizing the government’s employment data risks eroding trust and disrupting markets. The BLS is critical to the way governments, businesses and everyday people view the economy.
Unlike McEntarfer, who had decades of experience working in government, Antoni has none. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from Northern Illinois University in 2020 and took positions at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Heritage Foundation, where he now works as an economist. The Heritage Foundation is the architect of Project 2025, which envisioned a blueprint for Trump’s second term.
Among its suggestions was a recommendation to consolidate BLS with the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau to make it “a more manageable, focused, and efficient statistical agency.”
Antoni’s academic work is also sparse, causing concern from prominent economists. Last year, he co-published a report that purported “the American economy has actually been in recession since 2022,” which economists across the political spectrum have criticized.
In past appearances on cable media, Antoni echoed Trump’s dissatisfaction with labor statistics and with the Federal Reserve. In one appearance from earlier this year, Antoni accused the central bank of “election interference” for cutting rates close to the 2024 presidential election, a claim Trump has also made.
Antoni, who is not currently leading the bureau, faces a difficult Senate confirmation process. His nomination must first pass through the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, which counts moderate Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins as members.
A spokesperson for HELP committee Chairman Bill Cassidy told CNN the committee plans to hold a hearing for Antoni pending completed paperwork.
A hearing for Antoni would be rare, as the committee does not typically hold hearings for the position. But it wouldn’t be unprecedented. The last time this occurred was during Trump’s first term for another Heritage Foundation economist, William Beach.
Antoni as ‘phdofbombsaway’
Antoni’s Twitter account was created in 2015, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. He initially appears to have used his full name – ErwinJohnAntoni – as the username and Erwin J. Antoni III as the display name. The account’s profile picture featured Trump in revolutionary garb gripping a massive gun, an American flag at his back, a bald eagle perched on his opposite arm, and flames rising behind him.
Under two separate display names, Antoni frequently referred to himself as an “economist” on the account. In March 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, the account tweeted twice that he was an economist.
By May 2020, after Antoni was awarded his Ph.D., he had reverted the display name to Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III while keeping the handle phdofbombsaway. A conservative think tank tagged Antoni on the account in 2020, which helped CNN trace the account to him.
That summer, after he changed his display to Dr. Erwin J. Antoni III, he tweeted four separate times that he was an economist.
The account also used the phrase “You called down the thunder, now reap the whirlwind,” across both display names 20 times. On his professional account, “RealEJAntoni,” Antoni used the phrase “reap the whirlwind” at least three times.
Antoni’s posts during this time often mirrored Trump’s rhetoric. In January 2018, Antoni criticized a potential government shutdown as a way to “derail” the economy. “#SchumerShutdown is the Dems’ pathetic attempt to derail the Trump Train economy. It won’t work – get on board or get run over,” he wrote.
When Arizona Sen. John McCain passed away in August 2018, Antoni tweeted under his real name, “I like a senator who doesn’t die” — echoing Trump’s infamous line from 2015 insulting McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War.
Sometime in mid-2019, when Antoni was a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Northern Illinois University, the account’s username changed to “phdofbombsaway” with the display name “Dr. Curtis LeMay.” The profile image also changed to what looks to be a nuclear explosion. The username and display name appear to be a reference to “Bombs Away LeMay,” a reference to the Cold War general and his controversial stance promoting the use of nuclear weapons. LeMay ran alongside segregationist George Wallace on his 1968 presidential ticket for the far-right American Independent Party.
In other posts, Antoni frequently targeted progressive congresswomen in the so-called “Squad.” He called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “whack job” and “space cadet.” In November 2019, he called her an “antisemite” after she led an effort to try to force Trump White House staffer Stephen Miller to resign after leaked emails showed Miller shared articles from a White nationalist website before he worked at the White House. In March 2020, Antoni tweeted about Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Trump critic, saying “No one wants to have sex with that catfish.” When Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted in support of “LGBTQIA+” issues, Antoni invoked a debunked conspiracy theory that Omar was married to her brother. “Does the I stand for incest? With your brother?” he wrote.
He also repeatedly tweeted that liberal economist Paul Krugman was a pedophile, a smear for which there is no evidence – and one he also hurled at former President Joe Biden and former FBI director James Comey.
In February 2020, Antoni declared: “Feminism is that belief by which women are liberated from false slavery to men in order to become true slaves to corporations.” And in another post, responding to a post to #TellMeALie, he wrote “attractive feminists exist.”
And in March 2020, he dismissed LGBTQ people’s existence, writing: “There is only one sexual orientation — everything else is a disorientation.”
Some of his other provocative posts were sexually graphic anti-gay taunts at CNN anchors Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper, both of whom are gay.
Antoni also promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich — who was murdered in 2016 in what police described as a botched robbery — was actually the source of leaked DNC emails during the 2016 presidential campaign, rather than Russian hackers.
He engaged with an account that promoted the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory in hashtags, in a tweet attacking Sen. Adam Schiff, who was then a House representative. And he frequently tweeted at the far-right account “Catturd2,” known for spreading conspiracy theories.
Antoni, using his given name, also used the account to promote hardline socially conservative views.
In September 2020, he argued against abortion even in cases of rape, writing: “If the original principle was that abortion is wrong because it kills an innocent human life, then the manner of conception does not change that fact. In this line of thinking, abortion after rape would be punishing an innocent child for someone else’s crime.”
As phdofbombsaway in 2019, he once posted that abortion was “child sacrifice.”
Antoni abandoned his Twitter account after Trump was banned from the platform following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. He migrated over to the now-defunct website Parler using the phdofbombsaway username.
In one of the few archived posts from the account, he posted a meme of a Twitter avatar-like bird wearing an Adolf Hitler mustache and Nazi armband, writing “I believe censorship is bad, 1984-level bad.”
Bigots in Trumpville? Why am I not surprised? Remember that Trump himself was sued several times for refusing to rent his New York City apartments to blacks. He’s the same old bigot, just older, fatter, and uglier.
