At the beginning of May, rally trip that Trump has maintained with little disruption since his first presidential campaign encountered at a fairground in Greensburg, Pa., in the hills southeast of Pittsburgh. It had rained for most of the night and morning of the protest, and before the gates were opened, the grounds outside of the site were muddy and wet.
In the early hours, nearly everyone I met drifting down muddy pop-up boulevards with the TRUMP WON flag and LET’S GO BRANDON T-shirt kiosks watched the protests. Trump from state to state, for months or years. When I asked them what they thought of the last or next election, most cited part of the Trump-centered QAnon conspiracy theory. “It started with the British royal monarchy and the Vatican controlling everything,” Jill Wood, a protester from Ohio, told me. “There are only two teams: Team Jesus and Team Lucifer. And very easy to choose a side. “
The Greensburg rally, like all Trump-focused events, is an open-air marketplace for the full range of election theories currently circulating. A large LCD screen was playing “2,000 Mules,” a new, cleverly produced movie in progress (but unprovable, even on its own terms) claimed that the election was stolen by “vote harvesters”, who sent thousands of fraudulent ballots into drop boxes. When I asked a man watching it what he thought happened in 2020, he replied, “I wonder what happened to that tractor-trailer loaded with ballots?” — a reference to a request made about a truckload of absentee ballots that Trump Justice Department officials had long investigated and determined were baseless. When I pressed more, 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, is Mike Lindell, standing among Trump supporters, his loafers and trouser legs covered in mud. The CEO of MyPillow, the bedding company whose commercials are popular during the odd hours of cable TV schedules, became a Trump supporter and donor in 2016. made some of the longest-running plans to keep Trump in power after the election, and a week after January 6, he Photo shoot at the White House with a pile of papers displaying the phrase “martial law if necessary”. (Lindell has said that these are not his papers and that he did not read them.)
Since Biden took office, Lindell has rushed into the election with unparalleled energy and, by his own account, millions of dollars. He has documentaries, lawsuits, public record acquisitions, grassroots organizations, and a relentless effort to scrutinize voter lists for signs of fraud, one at a time. only. He has said that he contributed money to the Arizona audit. He held a “cyber symposium” in August 2021 in Sioux Falls, SD, during which he promised (but failed) to release data that showed compelling evidence of election fraud. . And late last year, he began holding his own “election of integrity” to provide support and guidance to state-level groups. He called it America’s Cause, after a quote by Thomas Paine.
This sheer frenzy of activism has made Lindell one of the most influential figures in the movement – an influence he, like Trump, is now trying to use in the primaries. department of the Republican Party, endorsing candidates for secretary of state and other positions. “I’m going to Georgia tomorrow,” he told me in Greensburg. The state’s Republican primaries, later that month, are seen by many as a test of the political validity of Trump’s campaign statements. It’s the only hotly contested state in which the Republican governor (Brian Kemp), secretary of state (Brad Raffensperger) and attorney general (Chris Carr) have directly and intentionally stood in the way of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. election 2020. Trump backed challengers to all three offices who backed his claim and dropped out of the race as a referendum on the issue. “We’re on the hunt for the Triad of Crime!” Lindell told me. “Then I’ll go to South Carolina for another event, and after that – I don’t know. Every day it’s somewhere. Because we have to save our country – save the American dream! “
