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More than half a year after Trump lost the presidential election, and with institutional-minded Republicans tired of litigation over its results, Lindell has become the embodiment of a definite point of friction in the GOP’s post-election identity: the belief that the election was fraudulent was, and still is, widespread Wide among the populist republic’s voting base, it is collapsing into a political and legal system that has long accepted the fact that it was not.
Just last month, a judge in Antrim County, Michigan, dismissed one of the last remaining election fraud lawsuits filed after the November elections, one on which many supporters, including Lindell, have pinned their hopes. Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, recently declared: “I don’t think anyone is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that’s over.”
Lindell didn’t let go. Therefore, it has become less welcome in some Republican Party circles. Last month, he was kicked out of a Republican Governors Assembly meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, which he said he was originally invited to. His work also suffered. More than 20 retailers have abandoned its product, and voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against MyPillow and Lindell earlier this year, accusing Lindell of spreading false accusations that the election was rigged.
Lindell describes the Dominion suit as a “big joke.” But in a recent lawsuit against Dominion and another voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, Lendl estimates he could suffer more than $2 billion in damages from what he claimed was a “reign of litigation terror and conspiracy to deprive Lendl and others of their constitutionally protected liberty.” of political expression.” In addition, he said that his reputation had been damaged and that he had been subjected to “threats to his personal safety and life.”
Not so long ago, Lendl was considered a potential contender for public office…and today, he’s complaining that he can’t even get a TV reservation.
Not long ago, Lendl was considered a potential contender for public office in Minnesota, a business artist-turned-politician not unlike Trump or Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler who served as the governor of Minnesota. Today, Lendl complains that he can’t even get a reservation on TV. (His recent appearance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” was a “miracle,” he said, even if Kimmel often made fun of him.)
Lindell said the election would be called off and Trump would be back in office by August, something Trump himself said to people. At MyPillow headquarters, Lendl hedged the exact month, noting that “it might be on its way, it might be September.” Regardless, he offered another emphatic deadline: “I’ll tell you this. The elections are coming, 100 percent, and there will be no machines in 2022.”
Even in Republican-leaning Carver County in Minnesota, southwest of Minneapolis—and even among some Lendl supporters who have known him for decades—there is a sense that this might not happen, and if it doesn’t, the repercussions may also be a lot for Lendl.
In her living room overlooking the Minnesota River not far from the MyPillow offices, Janet Lenzen, who with her husband Dick once rented an old bus shed for Lyndale where he made some of his first pillows, said, “Mike makes me nervous because he’s so hyper…I like what he’s trying to do, But I think it might go too far.”
She said Lindell is facing “tweeters and Facebook people”, who she said have “a great deal of power”.
“He did a good job, I’m afraid he’s going to lose everything,” said Lenzen. “He totally believes in God that God will help him get all these things. But sometimes, God says ‘no’”
If you understand Mike Lendl’s biography, it’s not clear what, if any, would make him stop.
Before Lendl ever talked about God or Trump or election machines, before the idea of the pillow came to him in a dream, there was Schmette’s Pub, the pub he owns in Victoria, Minnesota, and the ambiance that – if you grab Lyndell off a stage and drop him back behind the pub – would To approximate, in miniature, the electoral conspiracy circus he is organizing today.
Before he bought the pub with gambling winnings in 1990, a friend who spotted it for him told him that customers were “drunk. They’re noisy and throw things. It’s a nut house!” Lindell recalled in his memoirs. The friend “didn’t want to have anything to do with my smell.”
“This feels like my place,” Lindell thought.
Growing up in a trailer park not far from the tavern, near a pickle factory in Chaska, he wrote that as a boy he never felt like he fit in with the other kids, but “he learned a style to make up for it, a new habit that would become a style that would continue into adulthood: to show off” . There were little things, like jumping into a block of snow from the window of a moving school bus. And there were things that almost killed him, according to Lindell.
He wrote: “I fell into a lake and got stuck under a layer of ice.” “I was almost electrocuted by a lightning strike so massive that it shut down half the city. I bought a motorbike and destroyed it twice – the second time on the way to my skydiving lesson, hitting the ground at 60mph because my parachute didn’t fully open.”
“I’m starting to feel invincible,” Lindell wrote.
By the 1980s, after Lendl had dropped out of college, he was working part-time as a waiter in Chaska and learning card counting, a skill he brought back over the years at the blackjack tables in Nevada when he needed money in order to cover debts. Addicted to alcohol, cocaine and gambling, he was addicted to bookmakers for tens of thousands of dollars, with multiple DUIs and a theft conviction on his record.
He wrote in Schmitty’s Tavern, on the other side of Steiger Lake, he created “a daily escape from reality.” In his book, Lindell describes “People dancing at the bar, spraying each other with a set of Super Soccers, hanging upside down from the rafters…someone laying a brick of fireworks.” Lindell was a convenient host, allowing customers to write invalid checks and wait to cash them until payday, and he had a loyal following. He wrote: “I was selling alcohol, but not alcohol, if you know what I mean. I was selling fun. Family. Belonging.”
“Maybe it was because I had never felt a sense of belonging since childhood,” Lendl added.
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Today, Lindell is recognizable in living rooms across the country for the late-night commercials that began in 2011 and led to a massive expansion of the MyPillow brand. The privately owned company says it now employs more than 1,600 people and has sold more than 50 million pillows. Lindell is wealthy enough that he said he spent “millions of dollars” on network security for Frank’s website and $2 million on private investigators pursuing allegations of electoral fraud. Fly on a private plane.
Schmitty’s Tavern has since been renamed and redesigned by its new owners, no longer as unrestricted as it was when it belonged to Lindell. But some of Lindell’s old friends and clients are still drinking there. When I entered the list of nicknames mentioned in the book—”Skelly, Petey, Pokey, Fly Man, Mohawk, Sibby,” and asked if anyone knew them, Paul Johnson, who was drinking Budweiser, said, “I’m Pokey.”
He remembered that Lendl had been walking around “for days, not hours, and days only,” he said, a memory that correlates with Lendl’s own diary. At the time, Johnson said his expectation for Lyndell was “we’ll find him dead.”
“He’s a hyperactive guy,” Johnson said. “But he loves people.”
Johnson is not convinced, like Lyndell, that Trump will be reinstated. But he said, “I love what he does. He also won’t back down.”
Seated nearby, a man ordered two jacks and a Coca-Cola and said Johnson was probably right. But he felt like he had already seen this—in Lendl’s two failed marriages, in a career that, before MyPillow took off, always had its ups and downs.
“He was always building things and losing,” he said.
Nearly 20 years since Lendl sold the pub, it’s not hard to see Schmette’s spirit still alive in Lendl’s new mania. If Schmitty’s was, as Lindell wrote, “a place that made you forget your problems for a while,” today it presents Trump loyalists with the comforting fantasy that they don’t really live in the America where 7 million people chose Joe Biden.
Lindell, in fairness, has different takeaways than when he ran Schmitt. He said the tape helped him learn marketing and how to “read people”. But when I suggested to him that either way he was creating a community around him, he didn’t disagree with him.
One of the differences today, Lindell said, is “the community is so much bigger. So much bigger.”
Lindell offers Trump loyalists the comforting fantasy that they don’t really live in the America where 7 million people have chosen Joe Biden.
It could also be more dangerous, at least to the nation, than drunks shooting Super Soakers in a bar. In an interview in MyPillow with Eric Metaxas, evangelical author and radio presenter, Lendl described himself as the “pivot of the wheel” when it came to baseless claims about the election, when “people just started pouring it on me because I was the last voter, so to speak. . . There was nowhere else to go.”
Lendl himself may be the first piece of collateral damage. If Trump had won re-election in November—or had not been fully immersed in Trump’s fantasy that the election was fraudulent—Lendl today would have enjoyed a credible future in Republican politics in Minnesota. Trump encouraged Lindell, the state’s 2020 Trump campaign chair, to run for governor of Minnesota. The state’s Republican chairwoman, Jennifer Carnahan, has previously endorsed Lendl, writing on Twitter last year that “we’re going to make him our new governor,” and Lendl himself said he was “99 percent” sure he would run.
In the wake of Trump’s defeat, Lindell’s interest in running and any chance of doing so effectively appears to have waned. In January, shortly before Biden’s inauguration, Lendl was photographed entering the White House with notes suggesting “martial law” could be declared, inextricably linking Lendl to the most serious abuse of a president who lost Minnesota by nearly 7 percentage points. In response to this newfound fame, the Minnesota state press began examining him more critically. The Minnesota Reformer news site has debunked longstanding allegations of abuse by Lyndell’s ex-girlfriend and ex-wife, which Lyndell claims he has denied.
Like Trump, Lindell has been banned from Twitter for spreading misinformation about the election. Then came the Dominion lawsuit and the escape of retailers like Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond.
In an effort to show support, John Thomas, a Republican strategist from California who got to know Lindell at previous conservative political action conferences, said he recently told Lindell that he bought some of his papers. (They were better after washing up, Thomas said. At first, “They bothered me a little.”) He was worried about Lendl’s business, he said, but Lendl didn’t share his concerns. He said Lindell said to him, “They’ve already done the worst they can. What else can they do for me?”
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