THE REAL “ODD COUPLE”: DONALD TRUMP & THE “MYPILLOW” CEO

…Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO at the White House

The MyPillow CEO thinks President Trump is doing “the best job of any president in history”

Have you tried a MyPillow ? 

I haven’t tried one as I really like the pillow I have.  But I have talked to some people that did try one, and I personally have yet to find anyone that “Loves their MyPillow!”

The Issue I have with MyPillow, is not with the pillow.  It's with the company’s CEO, Mr. Mike Lindell.

Today, the CEO and founder of MyPillow pops up on your television, with his Tom Selleck mustache and Minnesooota accent, he sells you on the wonders of his machine-washable cushion. 

In these times of isolation, for millions of Americans, Lindell acts like he has something of an open invitation into your living room.  He is also beamed in by Fox News or Newsmax to gush to you about President Trump.  For most of the country, Lindell is like the unwanted guest at the garden party.  In these uncomfortable times, that means he’s going to be popping up at a Covid-19 briefing broadcast, live from the White House Rose Garden.

On the day of one particular Rose Garden briefing, Lindell had been welcomed to the White House as a member of the business community to discuss the private sector’s role combating the spread of Covid-19. And speaking from the lectern, his voice was gravelly while this “bedding magnate” used the Rose Garden pulpit to pitch the public on a different kind of awakening.

“God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on,” he said in his strong support of Trump’s election.  Now, he says it, with a little more prayer and with the help of the president and Trump's White House team.  According to Lindell, because of President Trump, it wouldn’t be long before America returned to its rightful spot as the greatest nation on earth.  His visit quickly became another predictable fight in the culture wars, with the critics calling it a “PR stunt”. .

“It was all very surreal,” Lindell said in a recent video interview from an undisclosed location, for “safety” reasons.   (He had been threatened multiple times after his meeting with Trump.)  “But I said what I said because I was led by God to say it. If I get attacked, so be it.”

The blow-back couldn’t have been a complete surprise for Lindell. As an early supporter of the president, he’s faced serious backlash since 2016.  He’s now more than just a friend of Trump’s: he’s a big donor and a sometimes rally opening act.  He is also now the recently named Minnesota chairman to the 2020 Trump reelection campaign. 

As for his own political future, Lindell denies reports that Trump has been pushing him to run for governor in 2022, but he admits he’s giving the idea serious consideration.

“It’s sure steering me in that direction to run,” he said about the pandemic. “I believe that things could be done a lot better . . . and I’m beginning to think I’m the guy to do that.”

In the past, it might have been easier to distinguish the scam artists from the genuine power players, but now the distinction is blurred more than ever. Which means it’s fair to ask: “Is Mike Lindell the future of the Republican Party, or is it just his pipe dream?”

Lindell is the serial “As-Seen-On-TV” entrepreneur and an evangelical Christian who travels the country preaching the Gospel.

He’s also a mile-a-minute talker who used to own and tend a bar and is quite comfortable swapping stories for hours with anyone who will listen.  “When you hang out with Mike, he has that kind of hyperkinetic energy,” said Matt Schlapp, the turkey that runs the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at which Lindell has spoken.  Per Schlapp: “You might wonder, ‘Did this guy take too much cold medicine?’ ”

But Lindell swears he’s not on anything. Not anymore. He’s a former crack addict, a retired gambling card counter with a history of bad debts.  He's had near-death experiences and multiple soured marriages, before he fully accepted God into his heart.

Such a past might be a liability for someone thinking about moving into a life of politics.

“I always advise people before they get into politics that they are going to get run through the washer and dryer,” said former senator Norm Coleman,  Coleman is a Minnesota Republican who thinks if Lindell does decide to run for governor, he could be a formidable candidate.

Lindell, who markets his pillows as being able to go through the laundry and still maintain their shape.  He says this potential exposure isn’t a cause for concern for him.

He’s open about his past.  So open, that he wrote a memoir and paid to pre-print 3 million copies out of his own pocket. 

He has just begun marketing it nonstop on television. It’s called: “What are the odds? From Crack Addict to CEO.”

“Who doesn’t like salvation?” he said, when asked whether the book could be a political liability. “Who doesn’t like a redemption story? Who doesn’t like the American Dream?”

His memoir is the story of a kid who grew up in a trailer park and having various run-ins with knife-wielding drug dealers and angry bookies.  He went on to start a company that he says has sold 47 million pillows. The idea to get into the cushion game, he said, came to him in his sleep, divine intervention from a God. 

God made him realize that it had allowed him to walk away from a car wreck, seven-day drug benders and violence-backed loans from his bookies.

Now, if parts of Lindell’s story seem unrealistic, such as that his drug dealers really did stage an intervention to get him to stop using drugs…?  You should also know that he’s been accused of large exaggerations many times before.

In 2016, he agreed to pay $1 million after 10 district attorneys from California sued his company for engaging in deceptive and false advertisements. 

Lindell had implied that his pillows could prevent sleep loss associated with insomnia, restless leg syndrome, neck pain, fibromyalgia, sleep apnea and migraines.  

And in 2017 the Better Business Bureau gave MyPillow an “F” rating, after there was a massive “pattern of complaint” from MyPillow users.

“It was a political hit job,” Lindell said. “It was for sure because I went all in for Donald Trump.”  In 2017, Lindell met with President Trump at an event with US manufacturers at the White House.

Of course, before Lindell ever met Trump in person, he says met him in a dream.

“I had a very weird, very vivid dream,” he writes in his book. “Donald Trump and I were in some kind of room.  It was an office with pictures on the wall behind us, and we were standing next to each other posing for a picture.”

Later, in the real world, he would snag an invite from a friend to the 2016 Republican Convention.  He was able to take in the proceedings near the Trump family VIP section and he hit it off with Ben Carson. This was before he received an invitation to talk business and politics with the candidate himself in the Trump Towers.

They talked about religion, about the need to build a border wall and to bring manufacturing jobs back to America.  Lindell says he’d never really been all that political before, but everything this businessman-turned-candidate said made perfect sense to him.

“I knew right away I’d be supporting him,” he said. At first it meant writing a news release announcing his support.  Then, it meant traveling to the third presidential debate, on the heels of the “Access Hollywood” tape scandal,  He took a position in the media-spin-room, even as members of Trump’s party had begun distancing themselves from the candidate.

“I was a crack cocaine addict for years,” he remembers telling one journalist.

“Then by the grace of God, I quit overnight. . . . Recently I met Donald Trump. He was so different from the man in that [Access Hollywood] video.”

This president, who prizes loyalty above all else, he was bound to like Lindell, who would go on to open for him at rallies.   He has traveled with him to Iowa and New Hampshire during his reelection push and has accept the role of campaign chair for Minnesota. 

This is a state that Trump came within 1.5 percentage points of winning in 2016, and which he has told associates he expects to win this time around.

For now, Lindell says his campaign job is mostly dormant. There’s just too much else to do.

His company has made hundreds of thousands of masks and donated them to hospitals and first responders, he said, it was at a personal loss of $1.5 million.  He’s been in touch with Peter Navarro, Trump’s national Defense Production Act policy coordinator, to coordinate,

and wholly support a president who Lindell believes is doing “the best job that any president in history could have ever done.”

The following is just too much for me to believe that Lindell actually feels this way about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s expert of communicable diseases.

Lindell now attributes all the president’s problems to Trump being up against a power-crazy doctor who is keeping the public awake at night with unreasonable fears.  Per Lindell: “Fauci? Are you kidding me? Who is he to decide what we should be able to do?”

And Lindell says the president’s got Democrats trying at every move to make him look bad:

“They want to keep everyone locked down so they can have mail-in voting and steal the election.”

This is why, even in the midst of a worldwide crisis, Lindell isn’t about to forget about the importance of politics.

After giving his speech in the Rose Garden in March, Lindell returned to the Oval Office. He and the CEO's from Honeywell, Jockey, Procter & Gamble and United Technologies had been invited back to get their photos taken with the president after the event, but as expected, only Lindell took him up on it.

“Maybe they had a schedule to keep or something,” Lindell recalled. “So I got my picture with him and Trump said: ‘You can use this when you go on your campaign.’ ”

Trump’s self-promotion and campaigning during the pandemic has been disgusting, especially in the midst of this crisis with so many Americans dying.

It is a national nightmare. But it’s obvious that getting his picture with the president at that moment for Lindell, it was his dream come true.

I just hope that if Lindell does run for the Governorship of Minnesota, the citizens of that state will understand who is asking for their vote.

Copyright G. Ater 2020