Election-denying MyPillow chief plots TV expansion in bid to help Trump
The MyPillow chief, Mike Lindell, a close ally and cheerleader for Donald Trump and his bogus stolen election claims, is expanding his own conspiratorial TV network, while aggressively stumping for Trump again and fighting defamation lawsuits from two electronic voting firms, one of which wants over $1bn in damages.
The moves by Lindell show the continuing presence of powerful parts of the pro-Trump movement, undeterred by the extensive legal peril their false claims of election fraud due to electronic voting machines have caused them. His expansion of his television network also shows the growing power of rightwing media as the 2024 race for the White House gets under way, and its ability to elevate conspiracy theories.
Lindell, a gaudy Maga loyalist who has spent millions of dollars pushing falsehoods about electronic voting machines to get rid of them, told the Guardian he had hired the ex-Fox Business star Lou Dobbs, a fellow election conspiracist and Trump ally, who now has his own show on Lindell TV.
Dobbs’s five-day-a-week show debuted on Monday at 7pm eastern time with a sycophantic Trump interview that sparked instant factchecks for his false claim that gas in the US was now selling for as much as “five, six, seven, even eight dollars a gallon”. Trump also suggested the economy would crash before long and voiced hopes it happens in the next year, which could help his campaign.
Besides Dobbs, Lindell said the TV evening lineup weekdays will feature his own program, plus shows starring Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, both Trump loyalists who are well-known for trafficking in election conspiracies.
Bannon and Stone received pardons from Trump in the weeks before he left office after they, respectively, had been indicted for defrauding investors in a Mexican wall scheme and convicted of lying to Congress.
Another host is Emerald Robinson, who was pushed out of Newsmax for peddling wacky theories about bioluminescent markers in Covid vaccines.
Since 2021 when he launched his TV network on his own platform, dubbed FrankSpeech.com, Lindell said he has poured $14m into the two pro-Maga ventures.
“We’re trying to expand my network,” said Lindell, who boasted that “I have 3 million people on Lindell TV and Frank Speech”.
Lindell is also ratcheting up his efforts to help Trump win the Republican presidential nomination and the White House. Along with Trump, the chief executive spoke at a rally in Iowa on 5 January, 10 days before the pivotal Iowa caucus vote that will choose who the state GOP favors to lead the 2024 ticket.
In another election move, Lindell said he will be a speaker at a late January event hosted by the Maga-allied group Turning Point Action that he expects to include efforts to prod voting clerks and county officials to switch to paper ballots and ditch electronic voting machines.
Election watchdogs and political veterans voice strong concerns about Lindell’s promotion of voting fraud conspiracies which can undermine confidence in elections.
“Whether he’s pushing bunk theories of a rigged election, hosting a ‘cyber symposium’ for fellow election deniers, or advocating for costly, outdated, and inaccurate hand counts, Mike Lindell has been a vocal proponent of dangerous and anti-democratic conspiracy theories,” Heather Sawyer, the executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, told the Guardian.
Similarly, former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said: “It looks like Lindell is setting himself up to participate in the next round of election disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all the trouble the guy got into in the last election cycle, you’d think he’d stay out of these political landmines pushing conspiracy theories about rigged election machines.”
Other critics concur.
“With a lineup similar to a Star Wars bar of Trump sycophants, Lindell TV is clearly designed to sow more disinformation about the credibility of American elections,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the fraud section at the US justice department.
Despite such criticism and his steep legal costs fighting defamation lawsuits from electronic voting firms Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic which he has charged “flipped” votes in 2020 from Trump to Joe Biden, Lindell sounds undaunted.
“I won’t settle in a million years,” Lindell said.
Lindell has counter-sued both Dominion and Smartmatic for over $1bn, claiming they engaged in a “conspiracy and enterprise to harm him”.
A born-again Christian and a former crack cocaine user who once proclaimed that Trump had been “chosen by God”, the 62-year-old Lindell told the Guardian in 2022 that he had evidence that Trump won the election by almost 15 million votes, even though Biden officially won by about 7 million votes.
Lindell’s crusade against voting machines is expected to continue when he speaks at Turning Point Action’s “Restoring National Confidence Summit” in Las Vegas this month which he said would draw over 200 voting clerks and county officials “from all around the country”.
Lindell said Cause of America, a group he founded whose self-styled mission is to “restore trust in local elections” and get rid of voting machines, has been “invited to train” attendees, charging that “all computer systems are hacked”.
The summit, which is slated to occur just before the Republican National Committee holds its winter meeting in Las Vegas, seems designed in part to rev up rightwing grassroots pressure on RNC officials to push faster for more paper ballots, a trend that’s already well under way.
The liberal Brennan Center has estimated that 93% of the votes cast in 2020 had a paper record, either “filled out by hand or printed by a machine for voters to review before they cast their ballots”.
Lindell has also used other media to promote his claims of 2020 election fraud and pro-Trump messages including Bannon’s War Room, where he has been a frequent guest. “I go on his show to help save the country,” Lindell said.
Bannon even pitched in to plug Lindell’s pillow business in November as it faced slumping sales and mounting financial pressures after several advertisers withdrew in the wake of Lindell’s 2020 election-fraud claims.
On another media front, Lindell has condemned some conservative proTrump outlets for retreating on their claims that Trump lost the 2020 election due to fraud.
“When was the last time you’ve seen anybody on Fox talk about the 2020 election? You’re not going to see it,” Lindell complained at a Trump rally in Arizona in 2022.
In another knock on Fox, Lindell said that its deal last year to settle the defamation lawsuit it faced from Dominion for $787m “was disgusting”.
Despite his attacks on Fox, Lindell’s MyPillow was the largest advertiser on the network, spending $80m in an 18month period after 1 January 2021, according to a New York Times report.
All that ad revenue was noted by the Fox owner Rupert Murdoch in a deposition he gave in early 2023. “The man is on every night. Pays us a lot of money,” read part of Murdoch’s deposition.
While Lindell crusades to get rid of voting machines, he also paints Republican officials as the major obstacle to his crusade. “Republicans are the biggest blockers of reform,” he told the Guardian.
Lindell grows irate discussing Georgia Republican figures, including the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who Trump tried to pressure to “find” 11,780 votes to block Joe Biden’s win in the state, and Governor Brian Kemp.
“You have crooked Brad and crooked Kemp,” Lindell said.
To election watchdogs and other critics, Lindell’s sisyphean drive to blame voting machine fraud for Trump’s defeat in 2020 is stunning and dangerous.
For Sawyer, of American Oversight, the need to counter Lindell and fellow election conspiracists is urgent. “Lindell is a leading voice in the effort to weaken and undermine our democracy,” she said.
Lindell is a leading voice in the effort to weaken and undermine our democracy
Heather Sawyer