Let’s set the scene. For roughly five years, Mike Lindell has been the nation’s foremost traveling salesman of the idea that American elections are a rigged carnival game, that voting machines are secretly phoning home to Venezuela, and that any result he doesn’t like is, by definition, stolen. He built an entire second career on it. He turned “the election was fraudulent” into a brand extension, right there next to the pillows and the “Slip Free” pillowcases.
So naturally, when Lindell himself lost an election this month, fair and square, by a margin so wide you could drive a MyPillow delivery truck through it, his first move was to demand the state prove it wasn’t fraudulent. You cannot make this up. Actually, you don’t have to, because he made it for you.
The Setup: A “Complete and Total” Endorsement, and a Complete and Total Faceplant
Donald Trump endorsed Lindell for Minnesota governor about a month before the primary, offering what The Hill described as his “complete and total” endorsement, and posting on Truth Social that Lindell “deserves a BIG WIN IN MINNESOTA.” Trump kept pushing Lindell’s candidacy hard on social media right up through Election Day.
Minnesota Republican primary voters, apparently unmoved by presidential poetry, delivered the big win to somebody else entirely. Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth won the Aug. 11 primary outright, with Lindell finishing a distant second, roughly 32 percent to Demuth’s 44 percent, a defeat by about 45,000 votes, or roughly 11 percentage points, according to reporting from the Star Tribune and Forbes. This was not a nail-biter. This was not “too close to call.” This was a beating, administered by a member of his own party, in a primary he entered as the presidentially blessed frontrunner.
Trump’s reaction to watching his hand-picked guy get demolished? Total silence. As Forbes noted, Trump has said nothing publicly about Lindell’s loss since it happened, which is its own small comedy: the King of Endorsements suddenly developing a case of selective muteness the moment his golden touch turns out to be regular old brass.
The Meltdown: Refuse to Concede, Cite “Anomalies,” Repeat
Give the man credit for consistency, if nothing else. On primary night, with the race already called and the math not remotely in dispute, Lindell told reporters his team had spotted unspecified “anomalies” that needed review, offering no actual evidence, per Forbes’ reporting. This is the exact move from the exact playbook he’s been running since November 2020: don’t concede, gesture vaguely at “irregularities,” let your fans fill in the blanks. It worked as a media strategy for half a decade. Whether it works as a governing platform after you’ve just been rejected by the actual voters of your own party is a different question, one Lindell seems determined to answer by yelling louder.
Then came the recount announcement, and this is where the story stops being merely sad and becomes genuinely, gloriously ironic. Lindell announced he would personally pay for a full statewide hand recount and audit, a request that Minnesota’s Secretary of State priced out at approximately $825,000, according to CBS Minnesota, with Lindell himself telling NBC News the total tab, once you factor in his own private investigators, could run “upwards of $1 million.” This is not a state-funded recount triggered by a close margin, the kind Minnesota law actually provides for automatically when a race is within a quarter of a percentage point. Lindell lost by 11 points. He is invoking an obscure discretionary provision that lets a candidate demand a full hand count no matter how badly they got blown out, provided they’re willing to write the check.
Which, sure, is technically his legal right. But read that back one more time: the man who has spent five years insisting hand-counting is the only trustworthy method, and machine tabulation is basically a Trojan horse for foreign hackers, is now paying nearly a million dollars out of pocket to hand-count a race he lost by 45,000 votes, hoping that somewhere in that pile of paper is a version of reality where he actually won. He told NBC News the recount was meant to be a step toward eliminating electronic voting machines even if it doesn’t flip the result, which is a remarkable thing to admit out loud. It’s not really about finding out what happened. It’s about finding a reason to keep saying what he already believed before a single ballot got recounted.
The Part Where the Money Question Gets Awkward
Here’s where the hypocrisy stops being abstract and gets embarrassingly specific: Lindell doesn’t actually have the money, by his own admission. Ahead of the primary, he acknowledged he was leaning on supporters to fund his campaign because his personal finances were tapped out. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Reformer reported he’s sitting on nearly $50,000 in unpaid property taxes on his own home. He stepped down as CEO of MyPillow to run for governor, and all of this comes after he settled a roughly $1 billion defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems over his 2020 election claims, and after a separate court found he’d defamed Smartmatic with similar allegations, with damages still pending, according to Forbes.
So the financial picture is: a company he stepped away from, a mountain of legal exposure from the last time he did exactly this kind of thing, five figures of unpaid property tax sitting on his own house, and now a voluntary million-dollar hand recount of a race he didn’t lose by a little. If you’re looking for the platonic ideal of “spending money you don’t have to prove a point nobody asked you to prove,” congratulations, you’ve found it.
And it’s not even his only controversy from this campaign. A judge found probable cause that Lindell may have broken campaign finance law by handing out branded pillows at a July Fourth parade, and Minnesota Republicans openly questioned whether he’d lived in the state long enough to legally qualify as a candidate, given he was reportedly living in Texas as recently as last year. His running mate has since taken the fight to the Minnesota Supreme Court asking for a review of the primary results, because apparently the recount hadn’t even started and it was already time to lawyer up.
In Fairness, Because Even a Roast Needs a Little Honesty
To be fair to Lindell for one paragraph: requesting a recount, even a long-shot one, is legally his right under Minnesota law, and he’s paying for it with his own money rather than the state’s, which is more than can be said for some past election disputes. His supporters would also point out that skepticism of electronic vote tabulation isn’t a fringe position everywhere. Some election security researchers do favor hand-counted paper ballots as a matter of general best practice, independent of any particular candidate’s grievance. That’s a real, separate debate. It just doesn’t require you to have spent the last five years insisting the last election you didn’t personally lose was definitely, unquestionably stolen.
Which brings us back to the actual joke here, and it isn’t really about voting machines at all. It’s about a man who turned “I refuse to accept that I lost” into a personal brand, a legal liability, and now, apparently, a campaign platform, running out of other people’s elections to relitigate and deciding to relitigate his own. Somewhere in Mar-a-Lago, the guy who endorsed him is staying very, very quiet.
Sources:
The Hill, “Donald Trump offers MyPillow’s Mike Lindell endorsement in Minnesota governor’s race”
Forbes, “MyPillow Founder Mike Lindell Won’t Concede Losing Minnesota Primary — As Trump Stays Silent”
Forbes, “Lindell Says He’ll Pay For Recount Of Minnesota Election He Lost Decisively”
NBC News, “Mike Lindell says he’ll fund hand recount of Minnesota governor primary ballots”
CBS News Minnesota, “Mike Lindell says he will fund statewide hand recount after losing Minnesota GOP primary by double digits”
Star Tribune, “Mike Lindell says he’ll pay for recount in 45,000-vote loss in Minnesota governor primary”
Minnesota Reformer, “Trump endorses Mike Lindell for Minnesota governor”
MPR News, “Mike Lindell ticket goes to MN Supreme Court for review of GOP primary loss”