Peter Navarro was proud of the coup...until he received a subpoena.

Now, not so much.

Everybody who appears on TV is faced with the choice of what to wear.  You want to look good on camera.  You want to put your points across.  You want to make what your parents and teachers used to call “a good impression.” 

The choice for men is more often than not a suit and tie. But there is a certain kind of public man who’s not satisfied with looking like every other Tom, Dick and Harry in business attire.  This is the man who chooses to appear in a dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up and his collar loose and his tie undone. 

I’m talking here, of course, of Peter Navarro’s recent appearances on Ari Melber’s show on MSNBC.  Navarro served for four years as the Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing in the Trump White House, and his TV look doubtlessly comes from his decades as a professor of economics and public policy at the University of California at Irvine.  In fact, his MSNBC backdrop shows university buildings at Irvine where he is now a Professor Emeritus.  I don’t know this for a fact, but I would be willing to bet that the look he’s putting across – with his sleeves rolled up and his shirt collar and tie loosened – is to show that he’s just come out of a lecture hall teaching a class of economics students, and he’s going to make this quick stop to chat on TV, and then he’s going right back to teaching his class because those students are depending on him, and it’s time to get back to work.

The impulse to look like he’s just been interrupted from doing something really big and important is all about power and projecting power and showing everyone how powerful you are.  Watch a clip of Navarro with Ari Melber.  He’s not just “talking with his hands,” he’s instructing – he takes the knife edge back of one hand and slaps it on the palm of the other to show emphasis; he pushes his hands away from his body forcefully to show Ari how he wanted Vice President Pence to send those elections back to the states; he holds both index fingers aloft in front of himself to make this point and then the next point.  

Melber caught Navarro in a gigantic contradiction on Thursday night.  He had recently announced he wasn’t going to cooperate with the 1/6 Committee or respond to its subpoena because “the president,” as he kept referring to Trump, had claimed executive privilege.  When Ari pointed out the folly of that position because on his show in January Navarro had laid out every last detail of how he helped Trump in his attempt to overturn the election, Navarro practically yanked off his tie and strangled the camera.

But Melber wasn’t finished with him.  Now that Navarro was facing a subpoena, Melber grilled him on everything he had said in January when he appeared proud of the coup.  What about all those phony Trump electors who had signed official documents saying they were the real electors when the National Archives and everyone else knew they weren’t?  Navarro’s hands flew through the air like helicopter rotors.  He didn’t have anything to do with that part of the plan, even though the phony electors were instrumental in challenging the real ones.  What about Navarro’s assertion in January that Pence absolutely had the power to overthrow the election? Melber wanted to know if he thought Vice President Kamala Harris could do the same thing in 2025.  Navarro threw up both hands like a quarterback calling an audible.  “No, no, no, no, no, no!” he shouted before Melber even got the question out. 

His impatience with Melber when the host asked a question was palpable because it meant he was taking instruction properly. It’s like Melber was one of his students who doesn’t pay attention in class.  Navarro looked like he was planning to leave Ari waiting in the hall the next time he comes around to the office for a dissertation consultation.  That’ll show him who’s boss, by God!  Let him cool his heels out there on a wooden bench, see how that feels!

His look of rolled-up sleeves and loosened tie and his karate-chop hands were supposed to work on Melber because they worked in the classroom, they worked with Bannon and Trump and Flynn when they were planning the coup, they worked everywhere, in fact, except with that damn Pence, who he called “a tool and a puppet.” 

In a book he published last year, “In Trump Time,” Navarro wrote that the plan for January 6 was for Pence to be the “quarterback” of something called “The Green Bay Sweep,” a plan Navarro hatched with Steve Bannon to reject electoral ballots from the battleground states Trump lost and “send them back” so the states could decertify their elections.  When that had been done, “in ten days or so,” according to Navarro, the whole business would be thrown into the House of Representatives, where because of the one-state-one-vote rule in such a circumstance, Trump would be declared the winner.  That damn Pence was like the rest of the traitors who wouldn’t listen. This is how Navarro summed things up in an email he sent to The New York Times:  

“Pence betrayed Trump. Marc Short is a Koch Network dog. Meadows is a fool and a coward. Cheney and Kinzinger are useful idiots for Nancy Pelosi and the woke Left.”

Maybe if people could have seen him in his shirtsleeves and his loose tie when he wrote the email it would have had more power.  In print in the New York Times, Navarro’s words have the sound of the stamping feet of a petulant little boy.