WASHINGTON – The Republican National Committee welcomed ubiquitous pillow salesman Mike Lindell into the fold after failing to become chairman, despite unsubstantiated claims that foreign powers stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump by hacking voting machines and post-coup-attempted visits to the White House with papers advocating “martial law”.
Lindell won the votes of only four of the RNC’s 168 members in the election at its winter meeting, but he was still praised by Ronna McDaniel, who won four two-year terms, and her allies.
“Where’s Mike?” McDaniel said, after winning 111 votes, more than twice the total of California RNC members Harmeet Dhillon and Lindell combined, when he brought both on stage and thanked them equally. “Thank you for the race you ran, for your leadership in our party. We are very grateful to you.”
That embrace of election liars worse than Trump himself caused consternation from former key Republican players.
“Sometimes I refer to the obscure as crazier than a sprayed cockroach. Mike Lindell is a madman who makes a sprayed cockroach look like a Zen master,” said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime GOP consultant in Florida who left the party after the Trump takeover . “Any embrace of Lindell by anyone is a sign of an incurable moral breakdown.”
Jennifer Horn, a former member of the RNC when she ran the New Hampshire state party, said cozying up to the likes of Lindell was not helpful. “More evidence that the GOP has deliberately chosen to build its future on dangerous, extreme, anti-democratic electoral denial.”
Lindell did not respond to HuffPost’s inquiries for this article.
In sales pitches to committee members as well as in media interviews, Lindell often claimed that he had been a major donor to the RNC but stopped after learning about the party’s lavish spending, which he described as a “money laundering operation.”
“With the RNC, money, I used to be a big donor, and you donate money, and when I know that almost half of it goes to fundraising … week in the “debate” sponsored by pro-Trump radio host John Fredericks, whose program Lindell sponsors.
In fact, Lindell has never donated directly to the RNC, and he never donated to a federal candidate or committee before Trump’s nomination in the 2016 presidential election, according to a HuffPost review of Federal Election Commission records.
Lindell donated $195,000 to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee, which distributed a total of $110,700 to the RNC between August 2016 and January 2018.
And although it is a significant amount, it is not different from the party’s big donors. According to a HuffPost analysis, Lindell’s total to the RNC makes him the 865th largest donor from August 2016 to November 2022, with 19 donors donating $1 million or more.
Even among donors to Trump Victory, Lindell’s total placed him only 475th, with nine donors giving more than $1 million.
In total, Lindell over the past six years has donated a total of $529,782 to federal candidates and committees – including $100,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC – an amount that is less than the $40 million he claims has been used to prove election conspiracy theories.
“I consider him a donor to some degree,” said one RNC member who spoke on condition of anonymity and defended McDaniel’s praise for Lindell. “They want to bring him in the camp in a way that can help.”
The praise for Lindell by McDaniel and others is based on the promotion of the MyPillow sleep product in the right-wing media. Lindell once earned a living counting cards at a casino and then overcame a cocaine addiction before starting a pillow business, he told HuffPost in a previous interview.
Today they meticulously track the effectiveness of various advertisements using unique “promo codes” for each program, be it a cable show or a podcast.
His interest in Republican politics began when he enthusiastically endorsed Trump in 2016 and began donating to Trump Victory. In the 2018 midterm elections, he appeared on stage with Trump. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Lindell appeared at the White House with vaccine and testing executives to announce that his factory would be making face masks.
Later that year, after Trump lost the presidency to Democrat Joe Biden, Lindell became one of the most influential purveyors of conspiracy theories. He was eventually sued for defamation by voting machine maker Dominion, which sought $1.3 billion in damages. And even after Trump’s attempt to force his own vice president to falsely and illegally give him a second term failed on January 6, 2021, Lindell was photographed in the White House holding a paper with the words “martial law if necessary” visible on him.
Lindell claimed he knew nothing about the documents he brought, but he didn’t stop lying about the “stolen” election. In the Fredericks debate – where he was the only candidate to participate; Neither Dhillon nor McDaniel showed up — they claimed nearly 2 million votes had been stolen from Trump in 2020 in California alone.
“He’s a nut job,” said Oscar Brock, a member of the RNC from Tennessee and one of the committee’s few outspoken critics of Trump. “They spent $40 million to convince people that the Italians affected the election results…. There is no Italian space laser that affects the total vote in the machine.
Even the RNC members who defended McDaniel’s efforts to pick Lindell acknowledged that the move was dangerous for the party with mainstream voters.
“It gives credibility to some of the crazy things he said,” said the member. “Anyone who thinks that the 2020 election is not won by Biden just doesn’t deal with the facts…. He needs to get some people around him who are actually going to teach him. Then the question: Will he listen to them? I don’t know.”