Last year at the White House Rose Garden, while standing next to then-president Donald Trump, My Pillow founder, and CEO Mike Lindell noted in a speech that his company would produce and distribute face masks to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. Now, however, the Trump-supporting, QAnon conspiracy believer says this has cost him millions of dollars and is stuck with masks he can’t even get rid of.
In an interview with The Daily Beast [1] this week, Lindell said making and distributing the masks has cost him and his company a combined total of $7 million, Yahoo! News [2] reports.
“I can’t give them away,” he said. “I tried. No one wants the things anymore.”
An aide to Lindell told Daily Beast they have two million masks they haven’t been able to get rid of and Lindell has suggested they “ought to just burn” them.
Lindell also confirmed to Insider [3] that he’d spent millions on the masks and that he still had millions of them left but he complained that Daily Beast’s characterization of this as a failure was a “lie” and said it was a charitable attempt to “help our country.”
Along with manufacturing masks, Lindell said he was also purchasing N-95 masks but wound up selling them at a loss or donating them. He claims millions of the masks were donated to a number of places, including the Arizona Navajo Nation, the state of Minnesota, police departments, and nursing homes.
In March 2020, he’d also told [4] one local Fox News affiliate that he wasn’t planning to sell the masks and was intending to donate them to hospitals. The masks, however, didn’t meet the standards set for healthcare workers by the Food and Drug Association during the pandemic. That, plus a market oversaturated with masks, pretty much meant the situation ground to a halt, he said.
But he said he doesn’t care, adding that while he eventually hopes to donate the remaining masks, that’s really not what he’s focusing on. And, as you might expect, Lindell is just as delusional as ever.
“I could care less about these masks,” Lindell told Insider. “My biggest priority is to bring this election down and all the investigation I’ve been doing with the election fraud.”
Indeed, Lindell has continued to push unsubstantiated claims about election fraud, even ridiculously telling Insider he still believes Trump will be reinstated as President by the Fall.
You have to really wonder how a man this foolish could found a major company. And of course, the $1.3 billion defamation suit brought [5] against him by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company he frequently targeted while claiming election fraud, is still ongoing.
The even funnier thing about Lindell is that he probably wouldn’t even recognize fraud if it was right in front of him. After all, he never understood what a huge fraud Donald Trump is, so really how would he even know?