Pillow King Mike Lindell Is Never Going to Rest

wilder since then. One of the most unwavering of Trump loyalists, he became a regular on right wing TV and at the president's rallies, and when the Trump administration's refusal to accept the election results finally crumbled in the days after the January six insurrection at the U. S Capital, Lindell was one of the last men standing in support. He was even photographed exiting the White householding notes that seemed

to advocate martial law. Lindale's problem seemed to abound, with retailers now refusing to carry his pillows and dominion voting systems threatening him with a defamation suit. And yet when Bloomberg business Week recently spoke with him again, Lindell made clear he's nowhere near done trying to convinced the world about the supposed election fraud that foiled Trump's reelection, and he also had a few things to say about that photograph, vaccines,

and well Pillow sales. Your data is a powerful competitive advantage, and the Spunk Data to Everything platform can help you turn that data into successful outcomes across your entire organization. Learn more at Spunk dot com, slash everything, never arrest, laugh at him, shut his business, sue him. The Pillow King won't stop his bizarre quest to prove Donald Trump

was cheated by Josh Dean. A typical person would be mortified to get caught on camera outside the Oval Office clutching notes that seem to suggest martial law as a way to help overturn a presidential election. For Michael Lindell, it was a blessing, possibly the best thing that had happened to the founder in chief executive officer of My Pillow in the challenging days since Donald Trump, the candidate he had fervently supported for the past four odd years,

lost the election and his job. Oh this is great, Lindell told me by phone in late January from an undisclosed location that later turned out to be Texas. That was a miracle that they took that picture. Now, all of a sudden all the media is coming to me. Nobody came to me before because they didn't want me to say the truth. That truth, being Lindell's opinion, evidence defying conviction is more like it that the November third

election of President Joe Biden wasn't a true and fair result. Biden, Lindell asserts, is not our real president and is in the oval today only because of many injustices, including but not limited to, voting by dead people, voting by illegal immigrants, voting by miners, late night dumps of ballots printed in China and smuggled into Georgia, and the one he really can't abide, the hacking of machines from dominion voting systems.

China did this along with four other countries. He said, you had China, a little bit of Russia, you had Iran. I can't remember the other two. It might have been Iraq. To state the obvious, none of this has been proved anywhere. Lindell has been among the most unwavering of Trump loyalists since the fall of twenty sixteen, when he met the then candidate at a campaign stop in Minnesota, home base of My Pillow, and decided this reality TV star was

the best man to lead America. That encounter occurred just a month or two before I met Lindell on assignment for this magazine. In fact, the day I arrived at my Pillow h Q, Lindell had just returned from a Trump election night party in New York and was proudly displaying a photo of himself with the President elect and Mike Pence taken at that event. As I wrote at the time, Lindell looked in the photo like a man

who couldn't believe his luck. This seemed back then as if it would be a quirky footnote in Lindell's colorful biography. After all, I had traveled to Minnesota to chronicle his bizarre life story, his rise from near death crackhead to wildly successful pillow salesman, most famous for starring in his own ubiquitous ads. If you watched late night TV or listened to the radio, you knew Mike Lindell and his magical pillow. But as the story revealed, you probably didn't

know the half of it. I hadn't thought a lot about Lindell in the years since, except when people would send me clips about him, often in the context of Trump, but his encounter with the future president changed the trajectory of his life. He became a regular on right wing TV and at Trump rallies, always there with a smile

as wide as his mustache to salute his man. And when the Trump administration's refusal to accept the election result finally crumbled in the days after the January six insurrection at the US Capitol, Lindell was one of the last men standing in support. This made him, in the waning days of January, a go to call for journalists looking for a final toke on the Trump news crack pipe.

When I finally reached him at nine pm on the day after Biden's inauguration, our talk had been pushed back three times because of the volume of calls from reporters. It's ridiculous the media, Lindell said, having just shoveled down his first meal of the day NonStop interviews, podcasts, TV shows for four days from morning till night. The latest volley of calls had been sparked by another surprise news hit.

That very day, England's Daily Mail newspaper was reporting the end of an unlikely romance between the My Pillow guy and actress Jane Krakowski of thirty Rock Fame. I have to say it was one of the weirdest and most surprising gossip headlines I had ever read. Lindell quickly dismissed the rumor of any romance, as has Kurkowski. He called it a hit piece about some actress I'd never met before in my life. They made it up, so I'm

suing them. This was no bluff. A day later, Lindell hired Charles Harder, defamation lawyer of choice for aggrieved conservatives. Perhaps you remember him as the lawyer who helped kill Gawker Media to file suit against a notorious gossip rag for asserting that he, a single man, had been dating an attractive woman who is also single for my evangelical platform. That's defamation, Lindell, who says he's a devout Christian, explained,

and he suspects it was a plant. I think they put it out to push the story of me going after the dominion machines and after the fraud, because now it pushed everything down. This was the crux of it. Lindell's assertion is that the story was concocted by enemies to push his election fraud allegations further down the results pages when people search his name. But Lindell had far

bigger problems than some arguably flattering gossip. His increasingly loud campaign to convince the world about election fraud was blowing back on his empire. In early January, eight big box retailers, including Coals and bed Bath and Beyond, dropped my pillow from their stores. Just barry Mike's company and barry him. Lindell snipped, put his employees out in the street, and an even bigger danger was looming. Dominion Voting Systems had

just threatened him with a defamation suit. You have positioned yourself as a prominent leader of the ongoing misinformation campaign, The letter said, litigation regarding these issues is imminent. Dominion had already sued Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and a couple of days after we talked, the company sued Rudy Giuliani. The letter probably didn't have the effect its drafters hoped for. Lindell doubled down. It was like a aafia letter. Lindell told me, you have been warned, and I'm going warned

of what they dropped that letter. Because I met with these investigative journalists that found all this evidence. Lindell was talking about two writers for a website called The American Report, which has a history of trafficking and conspiracy theories. These writers claim to have forensic proof, in Lindell's words, of Dominion machines being hacked to manipulate results in Biden's favor. I told Dominion, I said, sue me, then we get

the evidence out there. Quicker defamation suits can be devastating. A decision in Dominion's favor could destroy my pillow. Lindell said he wasn't worried. They don't want to do a lawsuit against me because they know we have all the evidence. If you do a lawsuit, you have to be deposed, you have to have discovery. And I would not have

gone out there if I wasn't sure. When I saw the President, I said, Mr President, I know I only have a few minutes, but I'm telling you everything I have in this world, every person I know, my business, everything, I will put it all on the line if I'm wrong. That's why I'm all in. I don't care about any lawsuit.

This is for our country and for humanity. It wouldn't have occurred to me in a million years that I'd be talking to Mike Lindell about voting machines, or election fraud, or really anything other than extensions of the My Pillow line. I knew four years ago that this was an unusual man, certainly among entrepreneurs who built nine figure businesses. I knew he was brash and reactive and completely without guard rails.

But I certainly never could have imagined that the next time we talked he'd be trying to undermine a presidential election. Most ceo s are careful by nature. They do everything possible to avoid land mines. Lindell just leaps into mine fields, and so far he hasn't blown up. His agitation on behalf of Trump has actually helped My Pillow, he said, though that isn't why he's doing it. Business is up so much the last week that we've had to keep

hiring people. Lindell said. His factories were adding shifts to meet the demand from fans of My Pillow and presumably the former president, the kinds of consumers who get outraged by cancel culture and show their disapproval by buying pillows as an act of revenge. We're so busy right now. Because of all these attacks. Lindell is used to this dance. This wasn't his first bout with bad press, or even his first bout with bad press at the White House.

Perhaps you recall the coronavirus briefing last spring, at which Lindell appeared to talk about how my pillow was ramping up production of masks to help fill a national shortage. Then he went off script. God gave us grace on November eight to change the course we were on, Lindell said, a nation had turned its back on God. I encourage you to use this time at home to get back in the word, read our Bible. I did not know he was going to do that. Trump commented, but he's

a friend of mine and I appreciate it. When I did that, our business went up about four fold, Lindell told me. But now this last week pushed it up to a new level. It just keeps getting busier because the public knows that this is all just an attack, and they go, why are they attacking him when he's trying to tell everyone that there's a machine fraud and we should never ever use machines again in an election.

This is the sole focus of Mike Lindell's life now in post Trump America to prove to the world that the election was illegitimate and that the main culprit was comprised voting machines. Since November fourth, not one waking hour have I not been focused on the election fraud, he said. I have put in over two million dollars of my own money into helping out different people throughout the country, supporting them both with resources and my time. So who's

running my pillow? The company, he said, is in capable hands. His son, Darren is at the helm. Lynn Ll said that for basically the whole last year he's been away from day to day operations of the company he founded. When they have problems, they give me a call. Speculation had been rampant in Minnesota that Lindell would run for governor. He was seriously considering it, but now he had doubts. This case against dominion had become a crusade, and if he can't win it, he has no interest in running

for any office. I would never even think of running until these machines are never used again anywhere in the world, he told me. Lindell was already extremely sure of the fraud, but claims that his smoking gun arrived in early January when those writers reached him. Also, another guy came to me, and he's a mathematic cyber forensic expert. I've never seen a genius like that in math, and he validated what

these other people have. Basically, Lindell's story is this, these machines had algorithms built in to count every Biden vote as one point two votes and every Trump vote as for fifths of one. This would be movable, he insists, but no one was allowed into those machines. That said, he claims that if you were able to fix the algorithms to deliver a true result, the actual count was seventy nine million, eight hundred thousand for Donald Trump sixty

eight million, two hundred thousand for Biden. But that doesn't count all the other stuff. You had eight thousand dead people that voted, You had the six thousand miners, twelve thousand people that didn't live in Georgia that voted, six thousand people that voted twice. Again, none of this has been proved. Lindell makes plenty of assertions like this about Georgia and Arizona and Nevada and Pennsylvania and even about his home state Minnesota, where no one has contested the

result except Mike Lindell. I would encourage any journalist who plans to discuss this subject with Lindell to clear the calendar. You're going to want some time. The various threads get confusing, and when Lindell talks about them, he does so furiously. It's difficult to take notes, let alone get questions in. Not because Lindell won't answer them. The man is an open book, but because having this discussion is like standing

in front of a fire hose. It's overwhelming, and the sheer mania of it all blurs the seriousness of what he's proposing. That we remove a sitting president and reinstalled Donald Trump. It's the biggest heist in the history of the world and the biggest crime against humanity, because these are communists that did this, Lindell said. Hold on a second, I said, what about the courts. At last count, Trump's lawyers had won just one of sixty two legal challenges,

some of them in front of Trump appointed judges. These judges, Lindell said, refuse to look at the real evidence. They

just couldn't handle the truth. I'll tell you this when this evidence gets before the Supreme Court, he said, referring to the forensic cyber evidence from the American report, When those nine justices if they look at it, because Chief Justice John Roberts is compromised, but if they do look at it, it is so blatant that they're all nine going to raise their hand and go, wow, we were

attacked by China and all this. The media, Lindell said, just won't show this evidence, and social media sites won't either. Twitter had been flagging Lindell's tweets for weeks and shut down his account finally on January, So it's up to him. They're trying to suppress this, but it will come out. You can't keep this down. And I got a big mouth. You do like to talk, I replied, I'm just so excited. Finally, I brought the conversation back to the White House photo.

If the evidence is so clear, then why on the day that infamous martial law shot was taken did then President Trump not jump at it. First, Lindell would like to correct the record the martial law thing. He says that wasn't him. A friend, a lawyer he wouldn't name, gave him some papers to give to Trump. Those papers, which he says he hadn't even read, included the martial law thing, plus a note about a new CIA boss. Lindell's contribution was his new evidence boiled down to four pages.

So I go in there with these four pages, and I go, Mr President, this is the smoking gun. The machine fraud is real. I have done my own tests. I said, I would bet everything I have in this world that this is accurate. He'd been promised only five minutes, and when that was up, a stafford took him upstairs to the lawyers to show them the papers. The lawyers took the papers, disappeared for a few minutes, and then sent Lindell back downstairs with the papers to wait again.

They said it will be about ten minutes. Shortly thereafter, someone clarified it would actually be two hours or possibly more. Lindell got the hint and was ruffled. I said, this is a matter of national security. I'm going to wait here until the President says that I'm supposed to go. That's when I went outside to make a phone call and the picture was taken. Finally, he was shown back inside to see some underling lawyers who listened for ten minutes.

It was like talking to the wall. When he asked them could he see the president to discuss this evidence, there would be no additional time, so I left. And then about two hours later I find out that that guy with the telescopic lens took that thing where it says insurrection or martial law. So then it's just Mike Lindell wants martial law for one thing. I don't even know what all it entails for another thing that wasn't my sheet. On the plus side, the photo sparked the

media circus that's still chucking along. I'm finding out every media person has my phone number. And when the Dominion letter hit the news, they just kept calling. You tell Dominion to get this lawsuit started, Lindell said. He told them, I welcome that I get to show my side to

the public. Let's do it National TV. The conviction with which Lindell stands behind the machine fraud is the same conviction with which he stands behind the botanical extract oleandren which he pedals as a preventer of COVID nineteen infections, and the same conviction with which he stands behind the former president. I'm not going to go jeopardize my reputation, my word. If I'm only sure, if I would have never met Donald Trump, I wouldn't have went all in.

I might have went in. Then I met him. I'm going, well, this is it. I believe in it. I believe in him, and I'm going all in. But what I asked him, if this fails, what if no one ever believes him, or worse, if he's sued and loses, At what point would Mike Lindell decide he's had enough. I'll never quit, he replied, So if I have to go door to door and show people, I will get it out there.

I'm very optimistic and I'm very persistent, Josh, and it's going to reveal itself and I'm not backing down ever. He's also, by the way, not getting the COVID vaccine. Are you kidding me? I've heard there are horrific things in there. This is a joke. And then they introduce a new virus anyway, They'll just keep introducing new ones anyway, He said, he has his own cure. I take my oleander every day. I've been in crowds, my employees that

take it, thousands of people taking this. You don't get it, and if you do get it, you're sick for two days at the most. So why would I take it when the cure has been here? Look it up on your online there, get yourself some. I'll ship you some. Then you don't have to take anything. I mean, you don't need to take this vaccine. It's all big farmer crap. Maybe, so, I replied, but I'm getting the shot. Lindell took that in. You go ahead, and I'll pray for you that you're

the one that doesn't die. And that's one of the stories in the magazine this week. Find more in the Karnis Show of Bloomberg Business Week. It is on newsstands, online, Bloomberg dot Com, and on the Bloomberg terminal. And be sure to listen to to our Bloomberg Business Week radio show. It airs live Monday through Friday at two pm Moll Street Time on Bloomberg Radio with myself and Tim Stanovic a Bloomberg Quicktake. Watch us too in our daily broadcast

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