When the cool kids sneer at you, do you wear it like a badge of honor? Mike Lindell should. He’s the “MyPillow Guy,” the TV-friendly entrepreneur and enthusiastic Trump supporter. He’s also a former drug addict who got himself clean and turned into an outspoken evangelical Christian.
So Lindell was never going to have the approval of the secular progressives at The Washington Post. But Lindell's made the big time as the target of a condescending profile in that Postiest of Post sections: “Style.”
“Style” is usually reserved for meditations on Michelle Obama’s sculpted arms or how Nancy Pelosi manages to look so put-together while running political circles around her cretinous opponents. So it’s a perfect forum to ooze derision for a bumptious Trumper. Lindell’s “Tom Selleck mustache and Minnesooota accent” attracted the attention of prototype Postie Ben Terris. Lindell is, in Terris’s formulation, “the type of player Trump tends to welcome into elite GOP circles — pitchmen, B-list TV stars, castaways who have no reservations about fluffing the president’s ego for a seat at the table.”
In case you missed Terris’s distaste, he describes Lindell as “what you might get if you took the political personalities of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, shred them down in a hammer mill, mixed the aggregate together, stuffed it in a linen case and sold the product between segments on Fox News.”
Meow, Ben.
Lindell really drew the left’s derision when he spoke at a Rose Garden event for manufacturers who were partnering with the government to fight coronavirus and said, as Terris relates:
“God gave us grace on November 8, 2016, to change the course we were on,” he said about Trump’s election. Now, he said, with a little more prayer and the help of the president and his team, it wouldn’t be long before America returned to its rightful spot as the greatest nation on earth.
Terris said the statement provoked a “predictable pillow fight in the culture wars.” Of course it would. Seemingly sincere expressions of Christian faith embarrass progressives, like flatchulance at the dinner table. And it earns their immediate distrust. As Terris says, “In the past, it might have been easier to distinguish the scam artists from the genuine power players, but now the distinction is blurrier than ever.”
“It was all very surreal,” Lindell said in a recent video interview from an undisclosed location, for “safety” reasons. “But I said what I said because I was led by God to say it. If I get attacked, so be it.”
Lindell is Minnesota Chairman of Trump’s reelection campaign, and has designs on running for governor. Terris is somewhat dubious at the notion, as though Minnesota never had an unorthodox governor before. Lindell is “a former crack addict, a retired card counter with a history of bad debts, near-death experiences and soured marriages before fully accepting God into his heart. Such a past might be a liability for someone thinking about moving into a life of politics.”
He’s written a memoir 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?’”
Uh, Mr. Lindell, meet Mr. Terris ...
