When the federal jury in Denver found that Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, had defamed Eric Coomer, the former director of security at Dominion Voting Systems, a few thoughts immediately came to mind:
That the jury, in ordering Lindell to pay $2.3 million in damages, let the conspiracy theorist off cheap for having publicly singled out an innocent Coomer — who left his job at Dominion, who would sink into depression and who went into hiding because his life was under constant threat — as a “traitor,” a “criminal” and “part of the biggest crime the world has ever seen.” If you remember, the defamed Georgia poll workers won a $148 million judgment against Rudy Guiliani. And Dominion negotiated a $757 million settlement with FoxNews. That in 2025, we’re still dealing with Donald Trump’s debunked claim that the 2020 election was rigged. There are many more defamation suits yet to be resolved. And from the witness stand, Lindell was still invoking Coomer’s supposed role in the supposed rigging. In closing arguments, his lawyers were calling Dominion and others the “Ministry of Truth” — a sideways reference to Orwell’s dystopian “1984” — who wanted to block so-called truth-tellers like Lindell from speaking out. That if we’re still working on 2020 and all that followed, imagine how long it might take to clean up Trump’s mess from just these few months of 2025 when he has clearly begun to fashion the U.S. rule of law into his own Trumpian code. Which can be summed up this way: Trump gets to do whatever Trump wants to do. (I’m still working on the Latin translation.)But the obvious thing about the verdict is how it tied into the weekend news. As you might remember, the weekend was meant to be a showdown of a kind between Trump’s simultaneous celebration of his 79th birthday and the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army with a Kim Jung Un-style parade on Saturday and the “No Kings” counter protest in cities across America and around the world.
The military parade was mostly a dud, for which we can thank the Army, which obviously planned a low-key affair celebrating the Army’s history and not the grotesque glorification of military might that Trump must have envisioned. The turnout was low. And so was the temperature of the march.
Meanwhile, the “No Kings” protests at more than 200 locations in the U.S. drew an estimated 5 million participants, including large crowds across Colorado. The number is mind-blowing, and so was the fact that, to Trump’s disappointment anyway, there was so little violence. Mostly, there were overwhelmingly exuberant and peaceful protesters drawing attention to the Marines and National Guard troops that Trump had sent to Los Angeles.
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SUBSCRIBEBut the weekend event that drew the most attention was the political murder of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the attempted murders of another Minnesota legislator and his wife.
Even though the victims were all Democrats, the MAGA police immediately tried to pin the violence on, you guessed it, Democrats in general and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in particular.
“A lie,” as Winston Churchill famously said, “gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.”
And so, the lying liars went to work on Democrats and the accused assassin, Vance Luther Boelter, whom they linked, based on the fact that Boelter was appointed by Walz to a nonpartisan Workforce Development Panel — one of hundreds of such commissions in Minnesota. According to a state website, there are currently 342 open positions on Minnesota boards and commissions.
As a Minnesota Reformer reporter wrote, it’s like saying a Sunday school teacher was “appointed by the bishop.”
Still, Elon Musk quote-tweeted claims, to his 200 million followers, that “the left” had murdered Hortman and that the “far left is murderously violent.”
Laura Loomer, the infamous Trump whisperer, posted that “Walz’s goons are now assassinating lawmakers who support legislation Walz opposes” and called the Democratic party “a terrorist organization.”
It seems that Hortman had voted for a bill repealing health care eligibility for undocumented adults. And that was apparently Walz’s motive. But, in fact, Hortman never voted for repealing that provision — which she had helped pass in 2023 — but only for the far larger budget bill that contained it.
Hortman helped negotiate the bill in an equally divided Minnesota House to include children, if not adults. That’s called compromise. And, you should know, the other legislator targeted by the assassin voted against the budget bill. So why was he shot and nearly killed? Don’t look for logic here.
By this time, it had become clear that Walz didn’t know the alleged assassin, who was, reporters learned, a Trump voter who was zealously opposed to abortion. And that the lists of those found in his car of possible victims were all Democrats.
That didn’t stop anyone, including Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who notably embraced the theories and then, to cap it off, had a little online, uh, fun with the murders for the sick amusement of his 600,000 Twitter followers.
”This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee tweeted under a security-camera photo of Boelter. That photo, as many have noted, may have been taken just before the Hortman couple were killed.
And just getting warmed up, Lee — a three-term senator, it turns out — later posted something he called “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” in apparent reference to the killer’s silicone mask and to his supposed connection to Walz, whose name Lee managed to misspell.
It took until Tuesday for Lee to take down the offending posts. But it wasn’t the public outcry from right-thinking people that changed his mind. Or the fact that his posts were based on lies, which he still hasn’t copped to.
What apparently turned Lee was a confrontation in the U.S. Senate between him and Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who was friends with the murdered Hortman.
Smith, who says she barely knows Lee (and for good reason), raced across the Senate floor Monday to confront Lee in a nearby meeting room. She reminded him of the pain his posts had caused her and how many Minnesotans, left and right, were affected by his posts.
She told reporters that such direct confrontations were rare in the Senate and that Lee didn’t seem to know how to reply. I don’t know. An apology might have been nice.
”I needed him to hear from me directly what impact I think his cruel statement had on me, his colleague,” said Smith, whose name was found among those who were apparently targeted by the gunman.
Smith’s deputy chief of staff sent a fiery email to one of Lee’s staffers, saying that he “exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post sick burns about Democrats … Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?”
Sadly, we know the answer. We also know, less than a year since the assassination attempt on Trump, the rhetoric needs to be toned down. The violence against public officials has been ramping up, and so has security. But there’s not enough security to protect everyone when the anger in this country is so near to the surface and so expansive.
Try to take in the fact Trump said he wouldn’t make even a consolation call to Walz. Trump told reporters on Air Force One that Walz “is so whacked out, I’m not calling him. Why would I call him?”
So what’s to be done in this world of misinformation, of which Trump and his MAGA mates are leading purveyors, unless people suddenly find truth to be more meaningful than lies?
You could look to the five million “No Kings” protesters as Americans hoping, at minimum, to speak the truth. Or you can try on another quote from Churchill.
In his “War Memoirs,” he wrote, “Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”
And here it is still today.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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