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Is a Trump Endorsement Becoming a Liability?

The president’s backing failed to secure a primary win in Minnesota for Mike Lindell. And he’s not the only one.

Gubernatorial candidate Mike Lindell makes his case for the GOP nomination in Duluth, Minnesota, in May 2026.

In the wake of this week’s primary votes in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Carolina, our punditry complex remains fixated on the left insurgency in the Democratic Party. But we should find some time, amid all these speculative forecasts, to linger over one of the most satisfying outcomes of this primary season: the decisive defeat of MyPillow impresario Mike Lindell as he mounted an ultra-MAGA bid for Minnesota’s GOP gubernatorial nomination.

Lindell is best known for his zealous public support of Donald Trump’s unhinged conspiracy theories about his 2020 electoral defeat—an effort that devoured millions of Lindell’s own fortune and resulted in a handful of delusional pseudo-documentaries peddling lies about election fraud, while earning him still more disavowals and deplatformings from media networks that agreed to air his calumnies in exchange for cash. Lindell has also faced a welter of court cases based on his election lies. In June, he settled a lawsuit brought by the voting machine company formerly known as Dominion, which settled an earlier $787 million claim against Fox News on the same grounds. A separate action, brought by a Dominion executive in Colorado, resulted in a $2.3 million judgment against Lindell, together with $4.4 million in punitive fees his lawyers are still fighting, amid a steady stream of sanctions for false citations and other errors. And the voting machine firm Smartmatic won a separate suit against Lindell, though he continues to refuse to pay the damages he owes.

This long trail of fabulism and conspiracy-mongering is a credential in a MAGA movement now rife with election deniers, and Lindell minted an enthusiastic Trump endorsement out of it, which pretty much furnished his entire campaign platform. But Lindell’s reliance on the president’s kingmaking prowess came decisively to naught: He was soundly........

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