As if dragging a three-wheeled carry-on across the mileage of an international airport isn’t enough, the government wants you panting before your flight. This week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a pull-up competition in the middle of Reagan National Airport’s Terminal 2 (not a metaphor) to announce the $1 billion in grants the administration plans to allocate toward healthy airport upgrades.

“I’ll leave no town unturned in Minnesota,” Lindell told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of a news conference set for Thursday.

He said he has a record of solving problems and personal experiences that will help businesses and fight addiction and homelessness as well as fraud in government programs. The fraud issue has particularly dogged Walz, who announced in September that he’s seeking a third term in the 2026 election.

A TV pitchman and election denier

Lindell, 64, founded his pillow company in Minnesota in 2009 and became its public face through infomercials that became ubiquitous on late-night television. But he and his company faced a string of legal and financial setbacks after he became a leading amplifier of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. He said he has overcome them.

“Not only have I built businesses, you look at problem solution,” Lindell said in his trademark rapid-fire style. “I was able to make it through the biggest attack on a company, and a person, probably other than Donald Trump, in the history of our media … lawfare and everything.”

While no Republican has won statewide office in Minnesota since 2006, the state’s voters have a history of making unconventional choices. They shocked the world by electing former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura as governor in 1998. And they picked a veteran TV pitchman in 1978 when they elected home improvement company owner Rudy Boschwitz as a U.S. senator.

Lindell has frequently talked about how he overcame a crack cocaine addiction with a religious conversion in 2009 as MyPillow was getting going. His life took another turn in 2016 when he met the future president during Trump’s first campaign. He served as a warm-up speaker at dozens of Trump rallies and co-chaired Trump’s campaign in Minnesota.

Trump’s endorsement could be the key to which of several candidates wins the GOP nomination to challenge Walz. But Lindell said he doesn’t know what Trump will do, even though they’re friends, and said his campaign isn’t contingent on the president’s support.

His Lindell TV streaming platform was in the news in November when it became one of several conservative news outlets that became credentialed to cover the Pentagon after agreeing to a restrictive new press policy rejected by virtually all legacy media organizations.

Lindell has weathered a series of storms

Lindell’s outspoken support for Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen triggered a backlash as major retailers discontinued MyPillow products. By his own admission, revenue slumped and lines of credit dried up, costing him millions. Several vendors sued MyPillow over billing disputes. Fox News stopped running his commercials. Lawyers quit on him.

Lindell has been sued twice for defamation over his claims that voting machines were manipulated to deprive Trump of a victory.

A federal judge in Minnesota ruled in September that Lindell defamed Smartmatic with 51 false statements. But the judge deferred the question of whether Lindell acted with the “actual malice” that Smartmatic must prove to collect. Smartmatic says it’s seeking “nine-figure damages.”

A Colorado jury in June found that Lindell defamed a former Dominion Voting Systems executive by calling him a traitor, and awarded $2.3 million in damages.

But Lindell won a victory in July when a federal appeals court overturned a judge’s decision that affirmed a $5 million arbitration award to a software engineer who disputed data that Lindell claimed proved Chinese interference in the 2020 election. The engineer had accepted Lindell’s “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge,” which he launched as part of his 2021 “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota, where he promised to expose election fraud.

The campaign ahead

Lindell said his crusade against electronic voting machines will just be part of his platform. While Minnesota uses paper ballots, it also uses electronic tabulators to count them. Lindell wants them hand-counted, even though many election officials say machine counting is more accurate.

Some Republicans in the race include Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, of Cold Spring; Dr. Scott Jensen, a former state senator from Chaska who was the party’s 2022 candidate; state Rep. Kristin Robbins, of Maple Grove; defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor Chris Madel; and former executive Kendall Qualls.

“These guys haven’t lived what I live,” Lindell said.

Lindell wouldn’t commit to abiding by the Minnesota GOP endorsement and forgoing the primary if he loses it, expressing confidence that he’ll win. He also said he’ll rely on his supporters to finance his campaign because his own finances are drained. “I don’t have the money,” he acknowledged.

But he added that ever since word got out last week that he had filed the paperwork to run, “I’ve had thousands upon thousands of people text and call, saying from all around the country … ‘Hey, I’ll donate.’”

That reality is showing up on a campus. A growing share of college students are seeking medical evaluations for ADHD, anxiety, and depression—and requesting academic accommodations such as extended time on exams and papers. At some of the country’s selective universities, the numbers are striking: more than 20% of undergraduates at Brown and Harvard are registered as disabled. At UMass Amherst, it’s 34%; Stanford, 38%, according to data analyzed by The Atlantic.

While it’s clear that many students requesting accommodations do so for legitimate medical reasons and that increased diagnoses may reflect greater mental-health awareness, some experts have raised concerns about overdiagnosis and whether universities are making it too easy for students to qualify. And the debate has set off a wildfire on social media this week, catching the attention of high-profile business leaders, including Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder.

Lonsdale’s response offered no sympathy. “Loser generation,” he wrote in reaction to a graph showing the rising number of undergraduate students reporting disabilities.

“At Stanford it’s a hack for housing though and at some point I get it, even if it’s not my personal ethics. Terrible leadership from the university.”

He argued that families have been slowly using disability accommodations to give their children an academic advantage—when they might not actually need it.

“Claiming your child has a disability to give them a leg up became an obvious dominant game theoretic strategy for parents without honor in the 2010’s,” Lonsdale wrote earlier this month on X. “Great signal to avoid a family / not do business with parents who act this way.”

And while it’s unclear how many students, if any, are trying to game the system, Lonsdale has made his broader view clear: he doesn’t think universities are preparing young people—or evaluating them—in ways that matter.

“No great companies are interested in the BS games played by universities,” he added.

Fortune reached out to Lonsdale for further comment.

Lonsdale’s complicated history with higher education

Though a Stanford alum himself, Lonsdale has a complicated history with the institution and higher education more broadly.

In the early 2010s, while serving as a mentor in a Stanford tech entrepreneurship course, Lonsdale was accused of sexual assault by a student—and banned from mentoring undergraduates for 10 years and from campus entirely. The assault charges were later dropped, but Lonsdale acknowledged violating a rule prohibiting consensual relationships between mentors and students.

Less than a decade later, in 2021, Lonsdale cofounded his own school—the University of Austin—with Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, and others. The institution prides itself on freedom of speech and overcoming the “mediocrity” of traditional higher education. It welcomed its first group of undergraduates last fall and remains unaccredited.

The school has drawn support from Lonsdale’s fellow Palantir cofounder and Stanford alum Alex Karp, who has also criticized the college system.

“Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect,” Karp, Palantir’s CEO, told CNBC earlier this year.

Instead, the 58-year-old said Palantir is building a new credential “separate from class or background,” that is the “best credential in tech.”

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian,” Karp said during an earnings call earlier this year. “No one cares about the other stuff.”