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After White House Meeting with Trump, Mike Lindell Calls for Military Coup on Facebook

‘That’s where my hope lies.’
January 16, 2021
After White House Meeting with Trump, Mike Lindell Calls for Military Coup on Facebook
Nothing to see here. Just a pillow salesman being invited to the White House to argue for the imposition of martial law and the overturning of a presidential election. We cool. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Following his meeting with President Trump on Friday, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said in a Facebook interview with Right Side Broadcasting News today that he’s praying that the military presence in Washington is part of Trump’s plan to retain power.

In Lindell’s interview—which has garnered hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook in just a few hours—he recounts the details of his meeting with the president and rattles off a series of unintelligible conspiracies in a Minnesota lilt.

“You know I’ve been looking down every hole for election fraud since November 4th and about eight or nine days ago this proof came out. One-hundred percent footprints from the machines of the machine fraud,” Lindell said. “I wanted to get it to the president. This is it. This shows that Joe Biden lost: 79 million for Donald Trump and 68 million for Joe Biden.”

When asked about the president’s reaction to this Lindell replied, “I said I talked to the guy. This is real. I said it’s got the IP address of the computer that it came out of. It also has the latitude and longitude like over in China this went over there came back and it shows the number of votes flipped. And he was very intrigued looking at it. . . . He goes, yeah like we all knew that right.”

Lindell said that the notes which included the words “insurrection act” and “martial law” were just part of a menu of legal options that was presented to the president. He said that the menu item that most intrigued Trump was the suggestion that he could order Facebook and Twitter and Google to reinstate all of the banned accounts.

Lindell said that after he shared this “proof” of fraud and the legal options, the president asked his national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, to take Lindell upstairs to share this information with the lawyers.

Lindell said he left the White House deeply deflated by the lawyers’ unfazed reaction to his blockbuster “evidence” and O’Brien’s objection to the notion that Trump has the power to unban all social media accounts unilaterally. He was further distressed by the “piranhas”in the press corps who were criticizing the meeting.

The national security advisor meeting with a crack addict-turned-bed cushion magnate who sponsors a far-right extremist media empire a week after a domestic terror attack on the U.S. Capitol is concerning in its own right.

But in the interview Lindell went further, specifically calling for military intervention to keep Trump in power.

When the Right Side Broadcasting News interviewer suggested that “people are hoping that this military presence is a response” to the election fraud, Lindell replied, “that’s where my hope lies.”

Here’s a selection of the crazy from Lindell’s interview:

Lindell: It was the security advisor Robert O’Brien. He brings me upstairs. And the president said, bring him up to lawyers, show ’em this and come back down. . . . They bring me back downstairs and I wait about 10 minutes. . . . I had the stuff in my hand which I was now bringing it up to the lawyers. . . . I sat down with the two, the one lawyer is all upset with me. . . . I show them all this . . . you can see who did it, on the computer, how many votes were flipped. . . .

Lindell: This is an attack on our country by China and other countries that did this to us. . . .

Lindell: So I left there with a deflating feeling. . . . Mike Lindell wants the truth to be told to everyone in this country and everyone in the world to show that this was the biggest election fraud in the history of the world as far as I’m concerned. . . . We got videotape of them shredding all the ballots made in China and an invoice from China. . . .

Lindell: God’s got His hands in all and all this stuff will be revealed. And the longer it goes on you are finding more of the rats that pop up, the evil. . . .

RSBN Interviewer: What about . . . the Insurrection Act or Martial Law?

Lindell: Four pages that I brought to the president which was that evidence for the big machine switch. . . . Here’s all his options he could do. Basically it laid out all the options. One of the things the president really liked on there was Google, Facebook, Twitter he has the authority to order them to put everybody’s back intact their Facebook and their Twitters back. . . . He turned to that Robert O’Brien and said “Yeah we could do this.”

RSBN Interviewer: What is your sense of the presence of the military here? Is it over the top?

Lindell: I don’t understand it. You know there’s like three people and every other person’s a military guy. . . . We’ve all had our prayers going, “Gee maybe somethings gonna be done that this president is willing to say hey we’ve been attacked by another country cause we have. Our country’s been under attack for a long time.”

RSBN Interviewer: I think people are hoping that this military presence is a response to what you just said.

Lindell: That’s where my hope lies. . . .

Lindell: One more thing. . . . You can’t hide this. I don’t care how much they corrupt the media and take away our platforms, there’s 100 million people that know our nation’s been stolen.

Two things:

(1) Are you surprised that the president of the United States would have a total crank like Lindell invited into the White House in the waning days of his term? At the same moment that he and his allies are bleating to the Democrats about how responsible they are for unity and decreasing tensions?

Of course not.

And the fact that you are not surprised is simply another data point in how far outside the norm this presidency has been.

(2) Ten days ago the president of the United States incited an insurrection: He summoned a mob to Washington and then exhorted it to storm the Capitol, disrupt Congress’s attempt to count the electoral votes, and overturn the election.

Now he invites a man to the White House who claims to have proof of The Big Lie that led to the attack and has the national security advisor meet with this person?

This attack on our country might be farcical. It might feel like a B-list Fargo rip-off.

But this attack is deadly serious and it is ongoing.

The president’s most recent White House guest told us as much on Facebook, while the vice president and the Republican Senate are M.I.A.

Tim Miller

Tim Miller is The Bulwark’s writer-at-large and the author of the best-selling book Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell. He was previously political director for Republican Voters Against Trump and communications director for Jeb Bush 2016.