What I mean: if an administration doesn't like a given metric, it should get its replacement metric identified and publicized in advance.
It sure looks a lot like gaslighting when the world has an agreed upon metric and you say "just ignore that; look over here."
The US definition of a recession was identified and publicized a very long time ago. The National Bureau of Economic Research has been putting dates on downturns since 1929 before there was such a thing as gross domestic product.
That's assuming that they had a previously existing problem with the metric. But why would they, it's always been a fairly reliable rubber stamp. Economic indicators give consistent bad news for an extended period of time, then months later 2 quarters of GDP numbers have been released and the metric says "yep, that was/this is a recession". But the metric now kind of falls on its face in this strange situation of quite a lot of bad economic indicators paired with a strong jobs market.
If we want to rigidly hold to the 2 quarters metric, then we're going to have to accept that "recession" means nothing larger about the economy than "2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth". It just becomes a short way of saying simply that.