Donald Trump does a lot of smart things, but he also does some inexplicably dumb things. Like–if this was an endorsement–endorsing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell as the GOP candidate for Governor of Minnesota:
At Friday’s rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, livestreamed on the White House’s official YouTube page, Mr. Trump took aim at Walz and Minnesota’s growing fraud crisis, adding his longtime ally Lindell, “deserves to be governor of Minnesota” after the myriad legal and financial woes the businessman dealt with in his quest to push conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
“That man suffered. What he did, what he went through because he knew the election was rigged. And he did it. I mean, he just did it as a citizen,” Mr. Trump said. “These people went after him, they went after his company. They did that with me too, but at least I knew what I was getting into. He was just a guy that said, ‘Jeez, this election was so crooked, it was so rigged.’ He fought like hell.”
One hopes that before long Trump will clarify that saying Lindell “deserves” to be governor was not an endorsement. Because I can’t imagine anything Minnesota’s Republican Party could do that would be as foolish as nominating Mike Lindell for governor.
There are several strong Republican candidates running for the 2026 nomination–not surprising in view of the fact that Tim Walz, running for a third term on an appallingly bad record, is eminently beatable. Mike Lindell is not one of them. It seems inconceivable that Lindell could actually get the nomination, but if he did, he would go down to the worst defeat in Minnesota’s history, ensuring a third term for Tim Walz and dragging many other Republicans down with him.
Can Donald Trump possibly be so naive that he doesn’t understand this? I hope not. I hope that in the North Carolina rally, he was throwing a bone to a loyal supporter rather than seriously suggesting that a no-hoper like Lindell should be the Republican nominee. But, not for the first time, we have cause to question Trump’s political judgment.
