The beginning of May, the rally tour that Trump had endured with few interruptions since his first presidential campaign landed at a fair in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in the hill country southeast of Pittsburgh. It had rained for most of the night and morning of the rally and before the gates opened, the outside areas of the venue were already soggy and wet.
In the early hours, almost everyone I met, as he drifted the muddy pop-up boulevards with TRUMP WON flags and kiosks selling LET’S GO BRANDON T-shirts, followed Trump’s state-to-state demonstrations, on and off, months or years. When I asked what they thought of the last or next election, most quoted some part of the Trump-focused QAnon conspiracy theory. “It starts with the British royal monarchy and the Vatican controlling everything,” Jill Wood, a rally-goer from Ohio, told me. “There are only two teams: Team Jesus and Team Lucifer. And it’s very easy to pick a side.”
The Greensburg meeting, like all Trump-focused events, was an open-air marketplace for the full range of election theories currently circulating. A large LCD screen played “2,000 Mules,” a new, slickly produced film that advanced the claim (but couldn’t prove, even on its own terms) that the election had been stolen by “vote seekers” who cast thousands of fraudulent votes into dropboxes deposited . When I asked a man looking at it what he thought had happened in 2020, he replied, “I wonder what happened to that tractor-trailer full of ballots?” — a reference to a claim about a trucked shipment of absentee ballots that Trump Justice Department officials had thoroughly investigated and found to be unfounded. When I pushed further, he shrugged. “I don’t know. If people can cheat, they will cheat. That’s my idea of human nature.”
In the middle of it all, figuratively and literally, Mike Lindell stood among Trump supporters, his loafers and cuffs caked in mud. The chief executive of MyPillow, the bedding company whose infomercials are ubiquitous in the odd hours of the cable schedule, became a Trump supporter and donor in 2016. election, and a week after Jan. 6, he was photographed in the White House with a stack of papers bearing the phrase “martial law if necessary.” (Lindell has said that these were not his papers and that he had not read them.)
Since Biden’s inauguration, Lindell had plowed into the election cause with unparalleled energy and, in his own words, millions of dollars. He had funded documentaries, lawsuits, takeovers of public records, grassroots organizations, and recruiting efforts to scrutinize voter lists for evidence of fraud, address by address. He has said he contributed money to the Arizona audit. He hosted a “cyber symposium” in Sioux Falls, SD, in August 2021, in which he promised (but failed) to reveal data showing definitive evidence of electoral fraud. And late last year, he started his own “election integrity” organization to provide support and guidance to state-level groups. He called it Cause of America, after a quote from Thomas Paine.
The sheer frenzy of this activism had made Lindell one of the most influential figures in the movement — influence he, like Trump, was now trying to exert in the Republican primary, endorsing candidates for secretary of state and other positions. “Tomorrow I’m going to Georgia,” he told me in Greensburg. The state’s Republican primary later that month was widely regarded as a test of the political potency of Trump’s election claims. It has been the only hotly contested state where a Republican governor (Brian Kemp), Secretary of State (Brad Raffensperger), and Attorney General (Chris Carr) directly and deliberately overturned Trump’s attempts to reverse the 2020 election. had been away. Trump had given his backing to challengers for all three offices who backed his claims and called the race a referendum on the issue. “We’re going after the Triple Crown of Crime!” Lindell told me. “Then I go to South Carolina for another event, and then — I don’t know. Every day it is somewhere. Because we have to save our country – save the American dream!’
