This first part here requires you to know a little about Mike Lindell’s past, before he found God, and it’s a little bit crass, but… Is Mike on crack? Or I guess, um, back on crack?

That’s my initial thought as I read the story out of New York this week about Lindell’s failing company, MyPillow, and the terrible financial state it’s in. It’s not just bad, it’s the worst you’ve ever heard of for a company that’s still in business.

Of course, it got that way for a reason, and I suppose I could have started asking whether Mike — who was actually addicted to crack when he was younger — was back on drugs when he decided to get involved in trying to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election. Lindell was sued by multiple people over the affair.

In fact, I guess the charitable view is simply that Mike isn’t very smart. During his stint as chief purveyor of election fraud nonsense, Lindell even held a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest with a prize of five million dollars. The winner of the contest, Robert Zeidman, “effectively demonstrated Lindell’s ‘data’ contained generic information about polling and was unrelated to the election entirely,” according to Business Insider. He now owes Zeidman not just the $5 million, but more than $4,000 in attorney’s fees since Zeidman was forced to sue when Lindell refused to pay him.

But a payday loan? That’s for degenerate gamblers. Oh, wait — that was Lindell’s other vice besides the crack pipe.

MyPillow took out a $1.6 million loan from Cobalt Funding Solutions, a short-term cash lending firm that specializes in providing funds for people who need them immediately. Even considering taking out such a loan effectively means your business is toast.

Now, like two other such loans Lindell has secured, he’s defaulted and asking a judge to rule that the loan was illegal in the first place. If that sounds like a scammer trying to justify getting money from someone and not wanting to pay it back, it’s probably because he’s done the same thing twice before.

Lindell knowingly entered into an agreement with Cobalt that amounted to a 409% interest rate, but scheduled for repayment in such a way that it skirted usury laws. Now he’s presenting it to a judge as though it was scheduled for repayment over a term that would show as the 409% rate, so that it would be effectively illegal.

There’s essentially a zero percent chance of him winning the case, but Lindell erroneously believes he can keep the whole affair tied up in court long enough for Cobalt to lose interest.

Nobody loses interest in getting their $1.6 million back.