President Trump caused a stir last Friday after he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) hours after it released a weaker-than-expected jobs report. In a post on his social media site Truth Social, the president blamed the Biden-appointed BLS commissioner, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, for manipulating jobs numbers to prop up Democrats and make his administration look bad. He promised to appoint someone “much more competent and qualified.”

Many of his critics sought to frame the move as a childish yet dangerous attempt to brazenly warp reality to Trump’s liking. Even outlets that are generally sympathetic to most of the president’s domestic economic policies warned that the move represented the same kind of politically perilous denial of economic reality that doomed the Biden administration while also threatening to lower trust in the federal government’s economic data.

As they’ve done earlier in the wake of Trump attacks on the federal judiciary and Federal Reserve, establishment “experts” rushed to reassure the public about the “independence” and “nonpolitical” nature of the BLS and the federal data collection apparatus more broadly. An effort was made to portray these federal data collectors as rigorous statisticians obsessed only with the truth and to assure readers that there is no evidence for the kind of brazen data editing that Trump suggested was taking place in his Truth Social post.

But while Trump’s assertion of BLS data manipulation was characteristically imprecise, there’s no question that the political establishment has been concealing, spinning, and even outright manipulating government economic data for its own benefit.

There isn’t clear, undeniable evidence that officials at the BLS are editing or making up the jobs numbers that go out to the public. But it’s easy to see why people think that they are when you look back at the series of dramatic downward revisions the Bureau has made in recent years—especially during Biden’s presidency. …

Unfortunately, as I and others said from the beginning, Trump’s substantial embrace of tariffs this time around has, in all likelihood, handed the establishment the scapegoat it needed to avoid blame when the economy next falls apart. The idea that tariffs alone can cause recessions is economically illiterate, but that won’t matter. The right’s refusal to acknowledge any of the real downsides of tariffs makes them easy to frame as out-of-touch ideologues to the majority of the politically disinterested public.

Sound economic theory and a proper understanding of economic history make it clear that we will have to face an economic recession at some point. And if the federal bureaucrats who have so far been doing all they can to cover up any economic slowdown that’s already occurring are really now pulling back, it may even come soon.

But whether it’s soon or years down the road, it would be a mistake for the right to take after the Biden administration and completely dismiss any sign of economic pain, even though they are correct to question the motivations of the officials in charge of much of the data. When the pain comes, people need to understand that it was the established political class and their banking cartel—the Federal Reserve—that truly caused it. Pretending like everything is fine will only help these perpetrators escape the blame they deserve.