The Long Awaited and Historic Interview Between President Trump and CEO Mike Lindell and the Producer Who Had This In His Mind Since November of 2020

The Long Awaited and Historic Interview Between President Trump and CEO Mike Lindell and the Producer Who Had This In His Mind Since November of 2020

Imagine you're a successful film producer and have booked the filming production of your life — an interview of MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell and the real President, Donald Trump — and you're doing it at Mar-a-Lago, a 126-acre historic private resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, built in 1924-27 by the heiress to the Post cereal fortune.

Throw on top of that the fact that it's your first time filming an interview with the president. It could be a little nerve-racking. Will the lighting be perfect? Will my equipment perform as it should? What about the sound and every other detail?

“But when the bulk of your team is your own family, you know everyone is going to do their part and do it well,” said Brannon Howse, founder and executive producer of Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network, a large media company. They also had Michael Nene with them, who has been working television production for WVW since he was 19, and he is now 36. This was the same team that produced Mike Lindell’s LIVE 48 hour Frank-a-Thon in April of 2020.

The work day at Mar-A-Lago started with set up at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 4th. It didn't end until 1 a.m. on Friday morning, with a long coach ride back to Memphis, Tennessee, for the Howse family.

Since Brannon hates flying and gave it up years ago, the family rents a professional touring bus from a Nashville-based coach company that services a lot of the biggest names in country music.

In addition to his dislike of flying, he also does not like staying in hotels. Howse is adamant that his wife Melissa travels with him everywhere, along with his yellow-lab Delta, that can be spotted on TV most nights lying to his right next to the news desk on a MyPillow pet bed.

Melissa serves as Brannon’s administrative assistant, oversees their staff who handles order fulfillment, and she also handles customer support and donor relations. In addition, she personally prepares, cooks, and serves the bulk of the meals for the numerous high-profile guests who come through their television studio. You can watch her cooking and home decor show here. (howsetohouse.com)

Melissa is almost constantly on her phone answering customer support and helping to coordinate events and television productions on the family’s packed calendar. Melissa and Brannon have hosted and administrated over 300 conferences since they founded Worldview Weekend in February of 1993 before they transitioned to a full fledged media and production company. If Brannon is not on TV live, he is on his phone booking guests and productions weeks in advance. Brannon has been in broadcasting for over 30 years, and to this day serves as his own producer that involves booking each guest personally so he can get to know the guest and their topic before going live on the air. Brannon hosts a national radio show live each day from 1-2pm CT on 58 terrestrial radio stations. In the spring of 2021, Mike Lindell encouraged Brannon to start broadcasting his daily radio show as a television show, as well, on Lindell-TV.

Brannon described how the production team traveled.

"We have two drivers, six bunk beds, and a master bedroom. We throw our camera and production equipment under the bus, and then my wife and I, my adult kids and three dogs, Michael Nene, and sometimes a security guy, climb on board. I sit at the table and work on emails and television production. The coach has internet built into the bus. We watch TV or a movie and work, then we go to bed. Everyone can wake up to a cup of coffee and then take a shower, and then when we arrive at our destination, we are up and ready to go."

Their son Logan, 18, and daughter Libby, 21, are both involved in the broadcast and production company. Logan is the senior control room manager and assistant executive producer, and Libby handles direct mail. Brannon and Logan produce live television starting at 7am CT and conclude at 10pm CT Monday through Friday. Brannon is live on the TV network four hours each day, which includes co-hosting The Lindell Report with Mike Lindell from 6-7pm CT Monday through Friday.

The same family team worked on four documentaries for Lindell this past spring and summer, including Absolute Proof and Absolute Interference that included such high-profile individuals as General Michael Flynn. Absolute Proof was seen by nearly 150 million in just four weeks.

But the Trump-Lindell interview was different. They could leave nothing to chance.

"We brought a ton of gear to Mar-a-Lago. We brought our switcher so all the cameras were being produced in real time by Logan. We also had SDI cards in every camera as a backup. We loaded the real time edit to the external cloud, so that it was backed up three times between the hard drive on our switcher, the cloud, and the 4 SDI cards. My concern was if we got in a wreck on the way home, God forbid, we didn't want to lose anything, so we loaded it up to an external location."

They actually left the Memphis area Tuesday night and drove through the night and got into Palm Beach a day early on Wednesday, around 11:30 a.m. EST. They spent the day resting up in anticipation of the big event. Howse broadcast his own television show on Lindell-TV Wednesday night from 7 to 9 p.m. from the motor coach.

After arriving at Mar-a-Lago around 1:30 p.m. Thursday, they had to pull all of their equipment out of the bus and disperse it along the length of the vehicle to be checked by the Palm Beach Police Department's bomb squad. This is standard procedure for getting in to see a former president.

"Three officers and a dog. They were all nice guys and very professional," Howse said. "Everyone we encountered there was very friendly and kind and personable. So once we got our gear all scanned in, we went in and set up, which took several hours. We brought more broadcast lights for this production than we have for anything. We wanted the production to be well lit and not have any flaws. And we had back-ups for everything, multiple back-ups; we were not going to risk anything going wrong. We had multiple recording backups so we didn't lose any audio, or any footage. We knew this was historic, so we weren't leaving anything to chance. When do you get two of the biggest CEOs in the world in a room together — Donald Trump and Mike Lindell — and one of them the (real) President? This was an historic and iconic moment."

And, when it airs, Howse said this will not be just another interview with President Trump. He said Lindell worked hard to prepare for the interview.

"Mike worked for several days on his questions. I know for a fact there are questions that have never been asked before."

Howse and Lindell rehearsed the questions, then Lindell went back and further and tweaked his questions.

"He worked right up to the point President Trump walked into the door, so that they were the most unique questions that no one had asked the president in any previous interview... there is a lot of give and take and back and forth in this interview. You could tell these two men had spent quite a bit of time talking to each other, and there was a comfort level as they would go back and forth."

About halfway through the interview, Howse said Lindell set his questions aside, "and it was almost like you were listening to a personal conversation from then on."

"They obviously share a lot in common, both being successful CEOs, but also share being two of the most attacked men in the U.S. Both were certainly two of the biggest-names in American conservatism being de-platformed, so part of the conversation was how the fake news had treated both of them and the absolute lies, distortions and propaganda. And the ignoring of the facts. The facts don't matter to these people. And the people who talk and write this way, they clearly hate America. They hate America, and therefore hate anyone who loves America."

One of the questions right out of the gate from Lindell was how did running the country prove very different from running the Trump business empire. "I think the discussion they had about that will fascinate a lot of viewers," Howse said.

"There was a lot of talk about the stolen election. About our country going through a revolution, basically jumping over socialism and right into Communism," he continued. "And losing the First Amendment. They both agreed that if something doesn't happen soon to restore the rule of law and free and fair elections, then the days of America are numbered; this cannot continue. Yet, at the same time the interview is very hopeful. It's two men who have laid it all on the line at great personal sacrifice, in hopes of saving the country and restoring our constitutional republic. Think of the billions President Trump set aside in hopes of saving our country and what Mike Lindell has set aside by being a patriot and a man of faith and speaking the truth. Mike’s company lost 65 million in revenue when the big box stores pulled MyPillow products from their shelves last year, not to mention tens of millions of his own money that he put towards election fraud! There are few men who can relate to each other as can Mike Lindell and President Trump. Most of us don't sacrifice this much and neither one of them had to do it."

Howse said his relationship with Lindell mushroomed quickly and resulted in a successful alternative media outlet for millions of conservatives who were fed up with the fake news they were being fed by Fox News and other networks. It started with Howse interviewing Lindell on his TV show, and then his radio show before the Nov. 3, 2020 election. Howse reached out to Lindell on January 9th concerning information about the stolen election.

"My whole reason for interviewing Mike was not only the upcoming election, but to introduce him to the successful digital network with tons of technology I had spent years building. I wanted to propose to him that I assist him in starting his own broadcast and media company, because I not only had the years of experience and technology and a proven track record, but I knew he was losing his voice and we could help him get it back," Howse said. "And from interviewing him and getting to know him, I realized we were like-minded and this man has the work ethic, courage, and name I.D. to build a television and media company to quickly rival some major broadcast companies. I knew Fox was going down, so my whole reason for originally contacting Mike Lindell was to propose to him the idea of Lindell-TV, but he was more focused on the social media aspect of things."

Howse encouraged Lindell to come back to his studio near Memphis and launch Lindell’s Frankspeech LIVE on television from his studio on April 19, 2020.

"Once we went live for several hours and worked in guests both in studio and online, Mike saw the capability. He'd been here before, but it didn't click with him that we had this level of network quality production combined with the ability to broadcast live. Everything we'd done previously with him had been taped. So he came in on April 19th and brought General Flynn, and so many others Skyped in — Alan Dershowitz, Ted Nugent, Steve Bannon, Diamond and Silk, and others — and that's when Jimmy Kimmel started playing clips of Mike and I and mocking us. It was actually really funny, and we laughed at ourselves and Jimmy’s jokes about us, with a lot of the clips that were taken from the Frank-a-Thon that went viral. It was during those two days that Kimmel invited Mike to come on his show. A week later, Mike is in Los Angeles on Jimmy Kimmel Live. It was one of the longest interviews Jimmy had done that year since Covid."

"The Frank-a-Thon clips were played by folks who liked us and who didn't like us, and off camera I was saying to Mike, this is why we need Lindell-TV. Few things are as powerful as the spoken word and moving images on television. It is so powerful to document what the left is saying and doing. It's powerful when we play their own words and then comment on the air about their agenda and why they are wrong."

Lindell had caught the vision.

"He saw the quality and how we could do it live and be part of the news cycle. On the last night of the Frank-A-Thon, Mike looked into the camera and said, 'Now when this is over, we're not stopping, Brannon is going to break in every night with a live news show, right Brannon?' And he looked at me. That's the moment I knew that Lindell-TV had just been born."

"That was how I found out my dream of working with Mike Lindell on live 24/7 TV was born—that's how I found out, the same time everyone else did. I found out about it live on the air. Like a lot of the things Mike does, I find out live on the air what we're about to do."

"On April 22nd, the first episode of the Brannon Howse Live show aired. It became a six to seven nights per week news show, and has been growing by leaps and bounds. Mike and I worked for weeks to build in a team of other hosts, and now the viewership is up to the point where a former president agreed to appear."

"But this interview did not happen until now because we were building up the network and the audience. The time for such an historic event as the interview between President Trump and Mike Lindell had to be just right, and that time is now."

Howse said he has a hunch there will be more Trump interviews in the future.

"I think in the future we will be seeing more interviews of President Trump on the network, and I think you'll see some of our other hosts interviewing him, as well. Diamond and Silk are friends with him, for example, and have a show on our network."

After the filming had ended on Thursday night, Howse said Trump stood up and offered to sign some Trump apparel that Howse's daughter had purchased.

"And my wife bought me a beautiful coffee table book on the history of Mar-a-Lago, so he signed that. He complimented me several times on my family, and he turned to me and said ‘good job with these kids,’ as he pointed to Logan and Libby. I said ‘it was all their mom,’ to which President Trump relied, ‘I can see that.’”

"As President Trump was signing my book, Mike Lindell told him about my nightly TV show and work producing Lindell-TV. To my surprise, the President said that he knew who I was and had watched me a lot on Lindell-TV and then commented on the April 2020 Frank-A-Thon."

When asked what were some of the things he would remember about the day Howse said:

     "I was not surprised, but I was thankful to be able to personally witness the leadership style and personal side of President Trump in his interactions with people. President Trump was constantly re-affirming other people in the room. Numerous times on camera and off camera he was complimenting Mike Lindell and his courage and work. He affirmed my wife and I as the parents of Libby and Logan and me as a broadcaster and television producer. He also picked up on the names of the people in the room he had just met and would use their name. For instance, at one point he called Logan by name and asked Logan if he would take a picture of just he and Mike. The President was not just fully engaging with everyone, but doing so in a manner that revealed his respect, interest, and appreciation for each person. The President was affirming others and that really is a highly respectable hallmark of a genuine and great leader."

When asked if he and his team were nervous prior to their interaction with President Trump, Howse replied:

"As you can imagine, everyone was a bit nervous about an interview with our real president. But as soon as he walked into the room and started talking in his very personal and down to earth style, everyone was immediately put at ease."

"As President Trump was signing the book to me with his personalized, big black sharpie, he hands it to me and says, 'you keep this.' I told him I absolutely will keep this gift, and I thanked him. The book he signed and the pen is in a display case in my office along with the group photo of the team with President Trump and Mike Lindell at Mar-A-Lago."

[See pictures below]

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