Well, it actually happened. The day America has been eagerly awaiting since Mike Lindell accepted Jimmy Kimmel’s invitation during his bizarro livestream event finally arrived on Wednesday, and there was the MyPillow CEO in the flesh sitting across from his supposed late-night nemesis.
“Somehow a simple pillow salesman from Minnesota got to the bottom of the deepest conspiracy in the history of American politics,” Kimmel said at the top of his monologue. “It’s so crazy, it’s almost hard to believe.” With the real Lindell presumably watching backstage, the host was visited by his own personal MyPillow guy, comedian James Adomian, who limped on stage wearing a “Who Farted?” tank top and went into a racist panic when he spotted Guillermo seated offstage.
The actual interview, which was preceded by an actual MyPillow commercial on the New York broadcast, began with a montage of Lindell’s most unhinged rants about what he still seems to believe was a stolen presidential election. When Kimmel asked his guest if he had been vaccinated, Lindell said no, which helps explain why they were not together in a pillow-filled bed as previously promised. “I meant for rabies,” Kimmel joked.
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Kimmel suggested that Lindell actually has a lot in common with Hunter Biden, given their shared history of addiction to crack cocaine, and asked him directly about the source of his “paranoia” and the fact that he has apparently been “in hiding” for several months.
“That’s right, I’ve been working hard on this election and the machines,” Lindell said, vaguely. After they got some of his basic biography out of the way, Lindell admitted that he didn’t know anything about politics until he met Donald Trump in 2016.
“Some would say you still don’t, Mike, to be honest,” Kimmel replied. Later, he told Lindell, “A lot of people didn’t want you to come on the show. Liberals and conservatives, everybody said, told me, don’t have you on the show, and they told you, don’t go on the show. But I think it’s important that we talk to each other.”
Kimmel added, “I don’t think there’s any validity to any of this stuff that you’re saying. And I’ve studied you, I really have.” And while he finds a lot of it funny, the host said, “A lot of these ideas you espouse, I think you could potentially draw a line from those to the riot we had at the Capitol where people were killed and a lot of bad things.”
Without skipping a beat, Lindell distanced himself from the riot and continued to rant against “the machines” and Dominion Voting Systems, which is currently suing him for more than $1 billion in damages for his baseless smear campaign. Then the two men started getting bogged down in a back-and-forth of allegations before Kimmel took a step back.
“Do you ever think it's weird, objectively, looking at yourself, going, why is it that the only person in the country who has this evidence is a guy who sells pillows on cable?” Kimmel asked.
Lindell couldn’t quite answer that question, showing no signs of self-awareness and prompting Kimmel to express what seemed like genuine concern. “I worry about you,” he said. “I feel like you are maybe self-destructive, that you have lost everything repeatedly so many times in your life.”
By the end of the interview, after Lindell denied urging Trump to impose “martial law if necessary” and claimed he never meant for his $50,000 donation to Lin Wood’s legal fund to help bail out Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, Adomian returned to challenge his doppelgänger to a pillow fight at the Minnesota State Fair.
Ultimately, as could have been expected, Lindell emerged relatively unscathed, fully in on the joke, and laughing it up with the two comedians as Kimmel cut to commercial.
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