E.J. Antoni, Trump’s new favorite economist, thinks a Nazi warship is ‘hard not to love’

JTA — Following an appearance on the right-wing network Newsmax in 2023, economist E.J. Antoni revealed the identity of the warship he frequently uses as his background art for TV interviews.

“Bismarck,” Antoni replied on X — referring to the massive Nazi battleship whose launch was attended and celebrated by Adolf Hitler. On another occasion, he wrote to a follower that the Bismarck was “hard not to love.”

It was one of several times that Antoni, US President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has expressed an affinity for Nazi-related imagery and history. He has also engaged in multiple friendly X conversations about German victimhood with the pundit Candace Owens, even as large swaths of the right began to isolate her last year over her growing, vocal antisemitism.

Now Antoni, the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, is poised to join the Trump administration in a key role. His nomination comes after Trump fired the former director of the BLS and alleged without evidence that she “rigged” the monthly jobs report — a closely watched barometer of the president’s economic policies.

“Our economy is booming, and EJ will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump wrote in a post on his social network Truth Social Monday. The position requires Senate confirmation.

Antoni’s nomination was criticized even by some conservative economists who have blasted him as “utterly unqualified,” with one saying he has “an inability to understand basic economics.” Others worry that Antoni, a frequent critic of the bureau and a partisan warrior for Trump in the past, will bring that bias to what is traditionally a nonpartisan, independent agency. The White House also said this week the economist had been a “bystander” during the January 6, 2021, riots by Trump supporters — noting he was present but did not physically enter the US Capitol.

Fascination with WWII-era battleships

Antoni’s social media also suggests he is a war history buff with a peculiar set of fascinations.

On X, he’s referred to his love of World War II-era ships from both sides of the battle, including the Bismarck, one of the largest German warships. The boat sank in 1941, killing more than 2,100 of its crew, after sustaining extensive damage from British fleets over the course of several battles. The ship had been active for a total of eight months.

The Bismarck, Antoni told one follower in April 2024, is “hard not to love” — adding he feels the same way about two American ships: the U.S.S. Texas, which fought the Nazis, and the New Jersey, which was stationed in the Pacific theater during WWII but later participated in US operations in the Lebanese Civil War.

In response to a request for comment from Antoni, the Heritage Foundation offered a statement it said came from the White House.

“EJ is a history buff, as many Americans are, and has an appreciation for the significance of maritime history,” the statement reads, adding, “His office is full of a variety of artifacts and artwork featuring US battleships and other famous vessels, including the USS New Jersey and the USS Missouri, that have been used throughout major wars.”

Naval historians have described the Bismarck as notable owing to its large size, advanced technology, short lifespan and dramatic, bloody takedown by the British.

“Bismark’s breakout into the Atlantic in the Second World War and her subsequent pursuit and destruction at the hands of the Royal Navy is one of the epics of naval history, a yarn that continues to exert fascination,” historian Iain Ballantyne writes in his 2014 book “Killing the Bismarck: Destroying the Pride of Hitler’s Fleet.” In his book, the author describes Hitler’s interest in “saluting the powerful boost to German prestige represented by the new warship.”

Ballantyne also noted the existence of a modern-day “Bismarck enthusiast” community, some of whom boast that the ship, once sunk, remained “intact on the seabed.” Reached for comment, Ballantyne told JTA that many veterans and ship enthusiasts have a certain admiration for the Bismarck’s craft.

British WWII veterans, he said, often held views “admiring the naval architecture, the lines of the ship, while loathing the cause the Kriegsmarine vessel and her men fought for.” He added, “My own, as a Briton, is reserved for the amazing warships and men that put an end to Bismarck.”

Stalin, not Hitler, was the real villain?

On X, Antoni also offered his views on WWII to one user in particular: Owens, who has steadily embraced a string of antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracies over the last year while maintaining followers in the millions. (This week, Owens suggested that the popular history of the Spanish Inquisition was “anti-Catholic propaganda” after reading a history book about the period authored by Benzion Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s late father.)

Last year, Antoni replied to at least two Owens posts on X, expressing sympathy for Germans in WWII. The first was in April 2024, shortly after Owens parted ways with Orthodox Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro over her escalating criticism of Israel. In response to an Owens post claiming that the postwar treatment of Germans was “the world’s largest ethnic cleansing,” Antoni recommended a book to her: “Stalin’s War,” a well-reviewed revisionist history that posits Stalin, not Hitler, as the driving force of WWII.

He replied to Owens again that July, in response to her sharing a clip from her podcast and YouTube video called “Literally Hitler: Why Can’t We Talk About Him?” At the time, the pundit had just recently been dropped from a Trump fundraiser following conservative pushback to her embrace of conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial and defenses of white supremacist Nick Fuentes and rapper-turned-Nazi sympathizer Ye.

Owens, again, offered her case that German civilians after WWII had been the victims of “ethnic cleansing” that she said dwarfed anything the Nazis had done, referencing a “BBC documentary” to prove her point. Antoni seemed to agree, while offering another historical factoid.

“I wonder if there’s also a BBC documentary about the hundreds of thousands of German civilians who starved to death after World War I because the British kept the naval blockade in place and refused to let in food, even after the armistice,” Antoni wrote in response.

Elsewhere on social media, the economist’s views on Jews remained mercurial.

In November, when a user on X dismissed conservative commentator Richard A. Stern as a “Jew,” Antoni defended Stern with a curious litany: “2+2=4 no matter who says it — a mathematician, a Jew, Jesus Christ, a Republican, a Democrat, Stalin, Mao, Mother Theresa — facts are facts, no matter who proclaims them.”