Business Insider
‘Do you realize you are describing a coup?’: MSNBC host challenges Trump aide after he described plans to overturn the 2020 election
Sinéad Baker January 5, 2022
- On MSNBC, Peter Navarro described Trump allies’ plans to decertify the 2020 election results.
- He detailed plans to challenge the results in battleground states.
- The host Ari Melber shot back, asking, “Do you realize you are describing a coup?”
The MSNBC host Ari Melber on Tuesday challenged Peter Navarro, a former Trump White House economic advisor, over his description of plans to challenge the 2020 presidential election result, saying Navarro was actually “describing a coup.”
Navarro has promoted former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that President Joe Biden, who has been in office for nearly a year, did not actually win the 2020 election.
On “The Beat,” Melber asked Navarro about Trump allies’ plans to challenge Biden’s win.
Navarro said the plan was to use over 100 US representatives and senators to “challenge the results of the election in the six battleground states,” including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
“And basically these were the places where we believed that if the votes were sent back to those battleground states and looked at again that there would be enough concern amongst the legislatures that most or all of those states would decertify the election,” Navarro said.
He continued: “That would throw the election to the House of Representatives. And I would say to you here, Ari, that all of this, again, was in the lanes legally. It was prescribed by the Constitution. There is a provision to go, rather than through the Electoral College, to the House of Representatives.”
He said this process started when lawmakers began to challenge Arizona’s results on January 6, 2021, and he criticized the media.
Melber shot back: “You just described this plan as a way to take an election where the outcome was established by independent secretaries of state, by the voters of those states, and legal remedies had been exhausted with the Supreme Court never even taking, let alone siding with, any of the claims that you just referred to. So legally, they went nowhere.”
Melber then described the plan Navarro had outlined. “Do you realize you are describing a coup?” he said.
Navarro responded: “No. I totally reject many of your premises there.”