From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

President Trump's nominee to lead an important government statistics agency is a Heritage Foundation

economist who only last week called for suspending the monthly jobs report.

Who is E.J. Anthony? Can he win Senate confirmation? And what signals are in the new

inflation report about the economy? Welcome. I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal.

We're joined today by my colleagues, columnist Alicia Finley and Joe Sternberg.

After an ugly jobs report recently, President Trump

fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming without really pointing to any evidence

that the agency had rigged the numbers to make him look bad. On Monday, the president named his

choice of replacement E.J. Antony, the chief economist at the

Heritage Foundation, who has a record as a defender of the Trump administration's policies

and a brawler on social media. Here is Anthony shortly after Trump's April

Liberation Day tariff announcement defending the idea on the Tony Kinnett cast.

I really do actually like the president's strategy here. I like the idea of reciprocal tariffs.

In other words, if you're going to put trade barriers in place for our exporters,

if you're not going to give us access to your consumer markets, then we're going to turn

around and do the same thing to you.

And the reason that's such a good strategy right now for the U.S.

is that so many of these countries need access to our consumer markets much more than we need

access to theirs.

In other words, although there's no winners in a trade war, they'll lose much more than we will.

And that's why, frankly, President Trump has

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