U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters ahed of boarding Marine One to depart for New Jersey, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 1, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Nobel Prize-winning economist turned political pundit Paul Krugman came up with a concept in his Substack on Wednesday that describes what he believes is behind much of the rot in President Donald Trump's administration.
Krugman, a frequent critic of the Trump administration who has warned the president's move to eliminate nonpartisan labor statistics gathering could put America on course for a Venezuela-style economic collapse, quoted the late historian Hannah Arendt, who noted, "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."
"Let me call this Arendt’s Law: Totalitarian and wannabe totalitarian regimes only hire incompetent hacks," Krugman wrote.
In particular, he sounded the alarm about Trump's decision to put the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the hands of E.J. Antoni, an economist from the far-right Heritage Foundation who has spent months attacking any data that made Trump look bad, and has suggested the United States might need to stop giving monthly jobs reports altogether.
"True, Antoni did say that the BLS should continue issuing quarterly reports, but scrapping monthly numbers would give Trump’s people more time to corrupt the data — and wanna bet that if the next quarterly report looks bad, Antoni, if confirmed at the BLS, would find reasons to hold off on its release?" Krugman wrote. "Incidentally, as Claudia Sahm reminds us, the BLS is legally required to issue monthly employment reports. So Antoni’s proposal, aside from being a transparently corrupt attempt to hide bad news, would be flatly illegal. I’m pretty sure that canceling publication of the Consumer Price Index, which will be next on the agenda once the full impact of Trump’s tariffs is felt, would also be illegal. But does that sort of thing matter these days?"
Krugman added that he has little confidence Republicans in the Senate will truly vet Antoni — and the problem is, once he's in office, the damage is done no matter what he does from that point.
"It won’t even matter whether the Trumpists cook the books (although they will.) For from the moment Antoni takes full control, nobody will believe any numbers coming out of BLS," wrote Krugman. "Fortunately, the same thing won’t be happening to other government agencies providing crucial information, like the Centers for Disease Control. Oh, wait."