How Stop the Steal Captured the American Right – The New York Times

In early May, the rally tour that Trump had maintained with few interruptions since his first presidential campaign touched down at a fairgrounds in Greensburg, Pa., in the hill country southeast of Pittsburgh. It had been raining for most of the night and morning of the rally, and before the gates were open, the outlands of the venue were already boggy and wet.

In the first hours, nearly everyone I met drifting down the muddy pop-up boulevards with TRUMP WON flags and kiosks selling LETS GO BRANDON T-shirts had been following Trumps rallies from state to state, on and off, for months or years. When I asked what they thought about the last election or the next one, most cited one or another strand of the Trump-centric QAnon conspiracy theory. It starts with the British royal monarchy and the Vatican that are controlling everything, Jill Wood, a rallygoer from Ohio, told me. Theres only two teams: Team Jesus and Team Lucifer. And its very easy to pick a side.

The Greensburg rally, like all Trump-centric events, was an open-air marketplace for the full range of election theories currently in circulation. A large LCD screen was playing 2,000 Mules, a new, slickly produced film advancing (but failing to prove, even on its own terms) the claim that the election was stolen by ballot harvesters depositing thousands of fraudulent votes in drop boxes. When I asked a man watching it what he thought had happened in 2020, he replied, I wonder what happened to that tractor-trailer full of ballots? a reference to a claim made about a shipment of trucked-in absentee ballots that Trumps Justice Department officials had investigated at length and decided was baseless. When I pressed further, he shrugged. I dont know. If people can cheat, theyll cheat. Thats my idea of human nature.

In the middle of it all, figuratively and literally, was Mike Lindell, standing among the Trump supporters, his loafers and pant cuffs caked in mud. The chief executive of MyPillow, the bedding company whose infomercials are ubiquitous in the odd hours of the cable schedule, became a Trump supporter and donor in 2016. He had factored peripherally in some of the longest-shot schemes to keep Trump in power after the election, and a week after Jan. 6, he was photographed at the White House with a sheaf of papers on which the phrase martial law if necessary was visible. (Lindell has said that these were not his papers and that he hadnt read them.)

Since Bidens inauguration, Lindell had plowed himself into the election cause with unmatched energy and, by his own account, millions of dollars. He had bankrolled documentaries, lawsuits, public-records acquisitions, grass-roots organizations and canvassing efforts scrutinizing voter rolls for indications of fraud, one address at a time. He has said he contributed money to the Arizona audit. He hosted an August 2021 cyber symposium in Sioux Falls, S.D., in which he promised (but failed) to reveal data showing definitive proof of election fraud. And late last year, he started his own election integrity organization to provide support and guidance to state-level groups. He called it Cause of America, after a Thomas Paine quotation.

The sheer frenzy of this activism had made Lindell one of the most influential figures in the movement influence that he, like Trump, was now trying to wield in the Republican primaries, endorsing candidates for secretary of state and other positions. Tomorrow Im going down to Georgia, he told me in Greensburg. The states Republican primary, later that month, was widely viewed as a test of the political potency of Trumps election claims. It was the only hotly contested state where a Republican governor (Brian Kemp), secretary of state (Brad Raffensperger) and attorney general (Chris Carr) had stood directly and deliberately in the way of Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump had thrown his support behind challengers for all three offices who backed his claims and cast the race as a referendum on the issue. Were going after the Triple Crown of crime! Lindell told me. Then Im going to South Carolina for another event, and then I dont know. Every day its somewhere. Because weve got to save our country save the American dream!

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How Stop the Steal Captured the American Right - The New York Times