There is something X-Files-ish about the Big Lie and Trump world in general. It’s as if the planet passed through some kind of a cosmic cloud which caused a lot of people to disown their own good judgement and common sense and vote for Donald Trump. In Mike Lindell’s case, he’s never emerged from the influence of said toxic, mind altering cloud. He really believes that nefarious forces robbed his Orange Overlord of his rightful place in the Oval Office. Wrong, Mike.
And being wrong about that has cost Lindell a lot of money, he claims $40 million so far. Add another $5 million to that tab, because arbitrators ruled that Lindell had to pay a computer expert who debunked Lindell’s specious claims and then refused to pay him, as promised. Washington Post:
He called the challenge “Prove Mike Wrong.”
On Wednesday, a private arbitration panel ruled that someone did.
The panel said Robert Zeidman, a computer forensics expert and 63-year-old Trump voter from Nevada, was entitled to the $5 million payout.
Zeidman had examined Lindell’s data and concluded that not only did it not prove voter fraud, it also had no connection to the 2020 election. He was the only expert who submitted a claim, arbitration records show.
“It had no connection to the 2020 election.” This is what you get when you pay the Hammer & Scorecard people to make up plausible sounding stories about you so that you can fleece the rubes. Although, in fairness, Lindell is not like Cantaloupe Caligula in one key sense: He really is a true believer. That’s the tragedy of this. If Lindell was just out there trying to sell more pillows and maybe do some pillow NFTs and possibly lobby for a place in Trump’s cabinet, then he would deserve what’s coming to him and more.
But Lindell is an innocent, in many ways. He honestly believes that wrongdoing took place in 2020 and he is here, personal fortune in hand, to avenge it. And that wrong assessment is his tragic flaw, as the Greek playwrights would describe it. His lack of discernment, or unwillingness to believe a painful truth, or both, is the character defect that will determine his fate, which in this case, is to go pathetically broke — and fast.
I actually sympathize, to a certain extent, with Lindell, because while Fox News “paid a parking ticket, Lindell is going to get wrecked,” in the words of Jonathan Last:
Say what you will about Mike Lindell, but unlike Rupert Murdoch and many of the executives and talent at Fox, he seems to genuinely believe everything he says in public.
The Fox people have to pay their parking ticket—$787.5m, some large portion of which will come out of their $4b war chest. These ducats will quickly be replenished by the roughly $4b in revenue that Fox News brings in yearly just from cable carriage fees.
None of the money will come from the personal accounts of the people who defamed Dominion.
I don’t know what Lindell’s finances are, but I suspect that $5m is a much more significant sum to him, personally, than the $787.5m corporate tariff is to the personal finances of the various people in and around Fox Corp.
In the Game of Trump, only the true believers ever really get hurt.
Last goes on to talk about the January 6 rioters, who thought they were acting with impunity, for a “president” who had their back, i.e., their legal fees paid, if not an out and out pardon. Wrong and wrong.
I suspect it’ll be the same with Mike Lindell and Dominion. Three months from now the Fox machine will still be printing money, without admitting fault or changing behavior. No one is going to lose their show for having exposed the company to legal jeopardy.
Yet I suspect that Mike Lindell will reach a different outcome. He’s already out $5m. When Dominion is finished with him, he’ll be a husk. Another true believer wrecked because he wasn’t smart enough to understand what was happening and wasn’t elite enough to have a moat protecting him from consequences.
And I do sympathize with Lindell, to an extent. Where the sympathy stops is that the man has demonstrated willful stupidity in willing to cut large checks to every con artist he can find who will tell him what he wants to hear about a stolen election in 2020. There was no stolen election. It’s a stupid hill for Lindell to have picked to die on, financially at least, but it appears to be the one he has chosen. And nobody can talk him out of it, seemingly.
Maybe that will change. Maybe losing this $5 million judgment, coupled with Dominion’s lawyers still breathing down his neck, will finally be the wake up call he needs. One assumes that Lindell enjoys a fairly comfortable lifestyle and if that is threatened, along with the pillow manufacturing factory and things that he holds dear, maybe he’ll finally wake up.
And on a deeper level, where I have zero sympathy for Lindell, is that he has done a lot of damage to the national psyche with his ravings about stolen elections. Due to him, a lot of people now have qualms and misgivings about the way our elections work, when they didn’t have so before he, and his right-wing compatriots, started making money off the Big Lie.
But, maybe he will wake up. If not, this play will have an ending like Oedipus Rex and Lindell will end up gouging out his own eyes, or more likely, selling pencils in a tin cup, or whatever the corporate equivalent of that is. I don’t see a rosey future for the man unless he can come to grips with his current addiction and how it is destroying him, and that is his membership in the Cult of Trump.
I don’t believe Lindell is a true believer in the “Big Lie.” He has always struck me as a grifter, not unlike his hero. He just chose the wrong con to try and grift from. The fact that he hasn’t decided to cut his losses and fade back into the woodwork just proves that he’s not that bright or that the MAGAts are buying a ton of MyPillows. I do believe Dominion will help him see the light.
I think you’re underestimating Lindell’s degree of delusion. He really does believe that the 2020 election was stolen. That is indeed his fatal flaw. The only question now is, can somebody talk him off the ledge or is he going to go over it?
I have zero sympathy for him. Actions have effects, and consequences, it’s never too late to learn.
Well, I don’t know how much he’s been paying out for them, but he’s still on TV hawking his various “MyCrap” stuff on cable–usually in the late-night/early-morning shows but I have seen a couple during the daytime. Scheduling isn’t too bad (though there have been a couple of times when the things have shown in EVERY commercial break) but you still have to wonder how much these channels/networks are charging? (And his latest batch of commercials are hawking the “MyPillow 2.0”–because Mike’s adopted some “new technology” that wasn’t available when he first “developed” the original “MyPillow.”)