The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Are you one of the 1 in 11 Americans Mike Lindell doesn’t want to arrest?

Analysis by
National columnist
Updated January 12, 2022 at 5:26 p.m. EST|Published January 12, 2022 at 4:15 p.m. EST
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell greets fans before former president Donald Trump arrives at a rally in June in Wellington, Ohio. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

It’s remarkable to consider that there is a wealthy man who has spent tons of money, certainly millions of dollars, in a futile effort to prove that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election and that that wealthy man is not Donald Trump. On the metric of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is running laps around the former president.

Suggesting that, for all of the heat Trump has taken for his unique track record in business, he does have at least enough sense to adopt an approach of frugality toward this year-plus-long waste of time and money.

Lindell does not. He keeps plugging away, standing up a “social network” (not yet operational), a streaming video service, hosting rallies and funding various other efforts to “prove” that the election was snatched out of Trump’s deserving hands. It wasn’t. Trump lost. But Lindell will apparently keep throwing money on this bonfire until either he’s out of money or, apparently, 91 percent of the country is put in prison.

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The watchdog group Right Wing Watch on Wednesday published a snippet of a Lindell interview that aired on the pro-Trump streaming site Real America’s Voice. In it, Lindell asserts that he’s more confident than ever that he will prove the thing he has, so far, completely failed to prove in any way, shape or form and, further, that the end result will be the incarceration of a population that’s equivalent to 9 in 10 people in this country.

“I’m more optimistic today than I have been — yesterday, the day before that. I’m on an incline like this,” Lindell said, using his hand to show the increase. “Why? Because it’s so amazing, all the things that we have — we already have all the pieces to the puzzle. When you talk about evidence, we had enough evidence to put everybody in prison for life, 300-some million people, we had that all the way back to November, December.”

So why hasn’t it happened? Because, he explained, he had to wait for evil to reveal itself.

Anyway, let’s talk about what it means to put 300 million people in prison for life.

I will stipulate up front that it’s not clear what he’s talking about. Lindell is the reigning American conspiracy theory champion, so we should not attribute to his statements the same standard of rationality that we might someone else. If you’re curious, the interviewer did not press him on this seemingly important point, instead moving forward without comment as is usually the case in these sorts of interviews with these sorts of networks.

So let’s operate under the assumption that Lindell 1) believes he has evidence that could put anyone in prison for life and 2) that he further believes he has evidence to put 300 million people in prison.

How many people is that? Well, it’s more than the number of people who voted for President Biden in 2020, 81 million in total. Of course, Lindell doesn’t think that Biden got 81 million votes, more like 68 million. Regardless, we’re still in the hole by more than 200 million votes.

Even if we assume — for some reason — that every voter committed some unstated crime that entailed a federal life sentence, it’s still only about half of the country’s population last year. Here’s the approximate distribution of voters in 2020, using turnout and population estimates from the Census Bureau.

This is not only every Biden voter but every Trump voter, too. Perhaps you think it’s unfair to include them; clearly Lindell doesn’t think Trump voters committed this Unnamed Federal Law violation. Well, sure, I’d like to make that assumption, but there’s no other way to make the math work.

After all, if we expand this universe to all American adults, we’re still more than 40 million short of Lindell’s target for incarceration. Mike Lindell has indisputable proof that you committed Unidentified Federal Crime and are going to prison, much as it pains me to tell you that. But even with that revelation, there are still more targets out there for Lindell’s police to scoop up.

Basically, the number of people that Lindell has identified as culpable here is every American aged 7 and up, a group that totals 302 million. If we assume that everyone who was 6 or younger did not commit The Crime That Is So Bad, then we get to Lindell’s number. Sorry for those 9-year-olds about to spend the next 65 years at Leavenworth.

There are of course other ways in which we could divvy this up. Maybe Lindell thinks that the 30-odd million Americans who aren’t criminals are solely those people who voted for Trump. Setting aside the implications for my own young kids, this still means that 6 in 10 supporters of the former president are still on their way to jail. Or, really, more than that, because Lindell also says that Trump, not Biden, got 80 million votes. So, then, 50 million Trump voters broke The Very Bad Law That Definitely Exists.

Lindell didn’t get into specifics about how this roundup would take place. After all, the federal prison population is about 158,000 at the moment, meaning that each currently serving prisoner (who presumably would have these additional Lindell-triggered charges tacked onto their sentences) would now need to share their cell with 1,900 other people. Everyone gets to use the cot for 45 seconds a day.

Of course, Lindell didn’t say that the people who Did A Very Bad And Very Unspecified Thing are all Americans. That’s just my assumption, though Lindell’s willingness to hype nonsensical fraud claims has almost certainly at times extended beyond the nation’s borders.

If we assume that he meant 300 million people around the world, things suddenly look a lot brighter for all of us. We go from 10 in 11 Americans heading to the pokey to 1 in 26 people globally.

Perhaps this explains the casual response of Lindell’s interviewer. Maybe she is already aware which massive group of nefarious international actors did The Horrible Election Stealing and is assured of her own innocence.

Or maybe she’ll be your cellmate. We’ll see once the evil is done delaying things.