RvR #17: Complete and Total
Trump endorsed Mike Lindell for governor. Minnesota's political class called it a five-alarm fire. Put Lindell's platform next to Tom Emmer's current record and there's not much distance between them.
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On Wednesday, July 15, President Trump posted this on Truth Social:
“Mike Lindell, the ‘Pillow Man,’ and one of America’s greatest and most hard working Patriots, is running to be GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA... Nobody has sacrificed more than Mike Lindell in fighting for our country, especially when it comes to Election Integrity... MIKE LINDELL HAS MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT – HE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN.”
The reaction inside Lindell’s own party was immediate. Minnesota GOP chair Alex Plechash — whose convention endorsed Kendall Qualls in May — publicly broke with the President’s pick, citing Lindell’s “serious financial baggage, public records showing tens of thousands of dollars in delinquent property taxes, significant electability concerns and unanswered questions surrounding his running mate.” DFL chair Richard Carlbom called Lindell “Minnesota’s election-denying Trump clone.” The Star Tribune described the endorsement as “a five-alarm fire for many in the GOP.”
The shared premise across all of it — Republican and Democratic alike — is that Mike Lindell is extreme. Out on the fringe. Not where the mainstream of the party stands.
This RvR tests that premise against one specific benchmark: the current public record of House Majority Whip Tom Emmer.
Lindell’s platform is short. That makes the comparison easy to run. Here are the receipts.
The Platform
Lindell’s campaign runs on a handful of planks, in his own words:
On elections: “Those voting machines need to go. They need to be melted down... and turned into prison bars.” (WCCO, July 2026.) His platform site calls for “strong voter-ID laws, paper ballots, common-sense safeguards on same-day registration.”
On fraud: “We’ve all heard of the rampant fraud on the watch of Tim Walz.” (Campaign launch, December 2025.)
On immigration: “Send illegal immigrants back.” (Campaign launch, CBS Minnesota.)
On Trump: A loyalty so complete the President calls him “one of America’s greatest and most hard working Patriots.”
Plus two state planks — “failing school systems” and “exploding property taxes” — that sit outside a congressman’s federal lane.
Now the Whip’s record, plank by plank.
The Chart
Six of eight planks: the Whip’s current record matches the candidate the party chair calls unelectable and the DFL calls a clone.
Two planks — the two that define Lindell’s national brand — it does not. Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it, because it matters.
The Distance Traveled
The chart above is just a snapshot, but Emmer’s record has been built over time — on several of these planks, Tom Emmer did not start where he stands now.
On election fraud. In December 2020, Emmer was the only Minnesota Republican to sign the amicus brief in Texas v. Pennsylvania, the suit asking the Supreme Court to invalidate electoral votes in four states Biden won. His statement at the time was process language: “All legal votes should be counted and the process should be followed — the integrity of current and future elections depends on this premise and this suit is a part of that process.” Careful. Conditional. A month later he voted to certify, and his certification-day statement threaded the same needle: “Millions of Americans do not trust the results of this election... I fully support the investigation into allegations of voter fraud and abuse” — alongside “Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors.”
By February 2, 2026, the conditionals were gone: “For too long, voter fraud has gone unchecked in Minnesota.” That sentence asserts, as established fact, the thing the 2020 statements were careful only to say people believed. It came attached to a bill — Rep. Stauber’s Minnesota Voter Integrity Act — that would withhold federal election funds from Minnesota until the state hands its voter data to the Justice Department. Secretary of State Steve Simon called it “an irresponsible stunt.” Nine days later, Emmer whipped the SAVE America Act through the House, 218–213.
On immigration. In July 2015, at a St. Cloud town hall, Emmer told constituents: “The Somalis, according to the measurements that have been used over time, are some of the fastest-assimilating populations that we’ve had.” He co-founded the Congressional Somalia Caucus that same year. In 2019, he voted against H.Res. 489, the resolution condemning the President’s tweets telling four congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from.
On June 25, 2026, at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event, Emmer supplied the sequel in his own voice: immigrants who don’t assimilate “should go the hell back to where they came from.” He added: “I’m done being careful, even the least bit careful.”
The 2015 quote and the 2026 quote are about the same community, from the same man, eleven years apart. One of them matches Mike Lindell’s platform. It is not the one from 2015.
On Trump. In October 2023, House Republicans nominated Emmer for Speaker. Within hours, Trump posted that “Voting for a Globalist RINO like Tom Emmer would be a tragic mistake,” adding that Emmer “never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement.” Emmer withdrew the same day.
What followed is a matter of public record, in order: Emmer endorsed Trump on January 3, 2024 (”proud to endorse Donald J. Trump”). He hosted a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser in March 2024. He became Minnesota state chairman of the Trump campaign. He spoke in primetime at the July 2024 convention — “We’ve always had a great relationship,” he told the Star Tribune that week. In January 2025, he defended the blanket January 6 pardons. By July 2025, Trump was posting that Minnesota has “a GREAT Congressman in Tom Emmer.” By a 2026 Oversight hearing, Emmer was saying “Thank God for President Donald J. Trump” into the record.
October 24, 2023 sits in the middle of that timeline. We are not going to tell you it caused what came after. Causation is a claim; the sequence is a receipt. The dates are above. Read them in order.
On fraud — one plank where the timeline runs the other way. Emmer’s first Feeding Our Future accountability letter went to USDA in September 2022, three years before Lindell announced. On Minnesota fraud, the Whip isn’t echoing the candidate, but they are aligned in the postion.
The Two Planks That Don’t Match
Now the part of the chart that cuts against the thesis.
Mike Lindell’s national identity is built on two things, besides pillows that is: the 2020 election was stolen, and the machines did it. On both, Emmer’s record genuinely diverges — and not quietly.
He voted to certify on January 6, 2021, while the mob’s damage was still being cleared, and called that day “an unacceptable display of violence that runs counter to everything we stand for as a country.”
He has no record — none we can locate across eleven years of statements, press releases, transcripts, and both verified accounts — mentioning Dominion, Smartmatic, tabulators, or hand counts. For a politician this online, on the signature issue of the man his party’s president just endorsed for Governor of his state, that silence is worth stating.
And this spring, Emmer’s own words appeared in the RightCount Action ad campaign pushing back on the President’s threat to federalize elections: “We have a state-based elections system. It is going to remain that way.”
The best witness for the divergence is Lindell himself. In October 2023, opposing Emmer’s Speaker bid, Lindell told reporters that Emmer had ignored his texts about election fraud and “pretty much didn’t believe there was any fraudulent stuff in the 2020 election.” That hasn’t stopped Emmer from making claims about fraudulent voting.
That is the whole gap, stated by the man on the other side of it: Tom Emmer would not say the election was stolen in 2021, but he’s hinting that now.
Everything else — the fraud framing, the voter-ID push, the deportation rhetoric, the pardon defense, the loyalty — the record now shows on both sides of the line.
What His Office Will Say
His office would say the certification vote is the whole ballgame — that believing elections need securing is not the same as believing one was stolen, and Emmer proved the difference with the single hardest vote available, on the single hardest day to cast it. They would say proof-of-citizenship and voter ID are mainstream Republican positions polling well beyond the party, not Lindell inventions. They would say the Minnesota fraud record — Feeding Our Future alone produced a 41-year sentence and $243 million in restitution orders — is a documented, prosecuted scandal, and demanding accountability for it required no borrowing from anyone’s conspiracy. They would note Emmer has endorsed no one in the governor’s race, that none of Minnesota’s four Republican House members have, and that supporting a party’s eventual nominee is what party leaders do. And they would say guilt by association is not a record.
Some of that lands. The certification vote is real. The fraud prosecutions are real. The distinction between “elections need securing” and “the election was stolen” is a genuine distinction — it is, in fact, the exact distinction this piece documents Emmer making in 2021.
The Question
As of publication — four days after “COMPLETE AND TOTAL” — Rep. Emmer has said nothing about the endorsement. Not on the official account, not on the personal one, not through the office. His own state party chair publicly broke with the President’s pick within hours. The Whip has not. We will update the record if that changes.
Nobody in Minnesota politics disputes that Mike Lindell is extreme. His party chair says it in everything but the word. The polling says it. The courts have said parts of it under oath — a $2.3 million defamation verdict in June 2025, a federal judge finding last September that “no reasonable trier of fact could find that any of the statements at issue are true.”
Set the two records side by side anyway. Six of eight planks now match, with the others indicating a convergence. The distance between the fringe candidate and the third-ranking Republican in the House has narrowed: that the machines were rigged, and that the election was stolen.
If Mike Lindell’s platform is extreme, what makes the same positions acceptable when they come from the Whip?
This is Rhetoric vs. Reality #17, a weekly MN-06 Watch series that puts Tom Emmer’s public statements next to the public record.
All Emmer quotes sourced from his verified accounts (@GOPMajorityWhip, @tomemmer), official press releases, C-SPAN, or transcripts independently produced by MN-06 Watch.
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Sources
The Endorsement
Trump Truth Social post endorsing Lindell — July 15, 2026 (full text via The Hill)
Star Tribune, “Trump drops political bomb on Minnesota Republicans with Lindell endorsement” — July 15, 2026
MN GOP Chair Alex Plechash statement — via Star Tribune, July 15, 2026
MN DFL Chair Richard Carlbom statement — July 15, 2026
Lindell reaction interview — WCCO/CBS Minnesota, July 15, 2026
Lindell’s Platform and Legal Record
Campaign platform — mikelindellgov.com
Campaign launch — CBS Minnesota, December 11, 2025
“Melted down... prison bars” — WCCO, July 2026
Coomer v. Lindell defamation verdict ($2.3 million) — U.S. District Court, Denver, June 16, 2025 (Colorado Sun/AP)
Smartmatic v. Lindell partial summary judgment, Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan — September 26, 2025 (Bloomberg Law/Star Tribune)
Dominion v. Lindell ($1.3 billion) dismissed with prejudice via confidential settlement — June 2026
Lindell on Emmer, October 2023 (”didn’t believe there was any fraudulent stuff”) — Star Tribune
Emmer’s Record — Elections
Texas v. Pennsylvania amicus brief and Emmer statement — St. Cloud Times/Star Tribune, December 2020
Certification vote and statement — January 6, 2021
Minnesota Voter Integrity Act cosponsorship statement — emmer.house.gov, February 2, 2026
SAVE America Act, H.R. 7296 — House Roll Call, 218–213, February 11, 2026
SAVE Act statement — via CBS Minnesota
MN Secretary of State Steve Simon statement on H.R. 7320 — February 2, 2026
RightCount Action “Power Grab” ad (”state-based elections system”) — The Hill, April 6, 2026
MN-06 Watch, “The SAVE Act: What They’re Selling vs. What’s in the Bill” — mn06watch.com/articles/save-act-explainer/
Emmer’s Record — Immigration
St. Cloud town hall, July 2015 — This American Life ep. 600
H.Res. 489 roll call — July 16, 2019
“Send them home” — @GOPMajorityWhip, December 30, 2025
SCAM Act introduction — emmer.house.gov, January 20, 2026
Faith & Freedom Coalition remarks — June 25, 2026 (C-SPAN; CBS Minnesota)
Emmer’s Record — Trump / January 6
Trump “Globalist RINO” post — Truth Social, October 24, 2023
Emmer endorsement of Trump — X, January 3, 2024
RNC remarks — Star Tribune/MinnPost, July 16, 2024
January 6 pardons defense (”weaponization of our legal system”) — January 2025; documented in MN-06 Watch, “Rhetoric vs. Reality #2: Weaponization”
Trump praise of Emmer — Truth Social, July 3, 2025
Oversight hearing remarks — emmer.house.gov, 2026
Minnesota Fraud
Emmer Feeding Our Future letter to USDA — emmer.house.gov, September 2022
Feeding Our Future prosecutions, Bock sentence and restitution — U.S. Department of Justice
Beautiful recap. Tom Emmer and the GOP deserve to be saddled with Mike Lindell. They can thank the President who endorsed him, the man they serve along with his unbridled corruption.