The Michael Fanone Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A viral bodycam clip is making the rounds right now. You’ve probably seen it — or you’ll see it soon — because it hits that nasty nerve we keep pretending doesn’t exist in this country. A woman stands in her driveway and tries to turn her local police department into her personal weapon. Not because her neighb...

Sponsored by Ground News John — You wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post to tell people you “haven’t changed,” and that it’s everyone else who did. I read it. All of it. And I’ve got a question that’s a lot more direct than anything in your column: What the hell are you actually for? Because what’s clear — painfully clear — is what you’re against. You’re against your own party’s base. You’re agai...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Something inside federal law enforcement just snapped — and Minnesota is the canary in the coal mine. Reuters pulled the court records and found that from January through the end of April, federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged eight people with serious gun or drug offenses. Eight. In the same stretch last y...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Election denial isn’t just some embarrassing opinion Republicans keep around to make the base happy. It’s a job application. Because the people still pushing the lie about 2020 aren’t only running for Congress or showing up on podcasts anymore. They’re running for governor — and a lot of voters don’t fully und...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com So a Republican candidate for governor of California got called out for ties to the Oath Keepers. And instead of denying it — instead of distancing himself — instead of doing what any serious law enforcement leader would do when confronted with an extremist militia label… He said he was “very proud” of it. The...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com We’re at the point where the Republican machine isn’t even hiding the strategy anymore: don’t win voters — buy leverage . If you can’t beat a Democrat in Pennsylvania the old-fashioned way, you try to peel him off, isolate him, flatter him, fund him, and dare him to cross the line. And the reason this story ma...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com I’ve heard “most important election of our lifetime” so many times it barely registers anymore. It’s become a slogan. A fundraising line. Something people say every four years while they keep doing the same half-measures and hoping the country magically cools off. But Robert Pape, a University of Chicago profe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Trump’s disapproval just hit 62% . And I need people to understand what that actually means — because Washington is going to do what it always does: treat this like a scoreboard. Like it’s just a horse race. Like it’s “good for Democrats” or “bad for Republicans.” No. This is the public saying, loud and clear:...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Democrats have this bad habit of treating Trump like a self-solving problem. Like if they just sit back long enough, he’ll implode, the polls will dip, and voters will “come to their senses” on their own. That’s not a strategy. That’s hoping the fire burns itself out while it spreads to the next room. A writer...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com This administration isn’t starting with smugglers, cartels, or the people actually profiting off chaos at the border. They’re starting with kids . Not kids trying to cross today. Kids who are already here. Already in government custody. Already stuck in the system — the most vulnerable people in the entire imm...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A gunman opens fire at an event tied to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and within hours we’re right back in the same ditch the media always crawls into. Dana Bash goes on TV and starts angling the conversation toward Democrats’ rhetoric — like the real story after an assassination attempt is whether t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The Department of Justice just indicted James Comey — a former FBI Director — for what they’re calling a threat against Donald Trump. And I need you to understand what that actually means. This isn’t a debate about whether you like Comey. You can think he screwed up in 2016. You can think he made bad calls. Yo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Hennepin County just charged an ICE agent with felony assault for pulling a gun on civilians during a road-rage incident — and a lot of people are treating it like some huge breakthrough for accountability. It isn’t. The agent is Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr., 35 , and prosecutors say he brandished and pointed hi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The Department of Justice just indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on federal fraud charges — and the core accusation is as backwards as it sounds: they say SPLC paid informants to infiltrate the Klan and other white supremacist groups, and that doing so “manufactured” the extremism they claim to oppose....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Virginia just did something that could change the math for 2026 in a real way: voters approved a mid-decade redistricting amendment that would allow new congressional lines before the midterms — a move that analysts say could put as many as four Republican-held House seats in play. And the immediate reaction t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The numbers are clear: since Trump returned to office in January 2025, Democrats have been over-performing in competitive races across the country — specials, local races, state legislative seats, judicial contests. It’s consistent enough that even Republican strategists are starting to admit it’s a real probl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com This administration just said the quiet part out loud: war isn’t a moral issue. Let that land. The people with their hands on the biggest military machine on Earth are telling you that when they decide to send Americans into harm’s way — when they decide who lives, who dies, what gets bombed, what gets flatten...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Here’s what’s happening right now, and it’s the kind of thing that tells you how power actually works inside this administration. Trump is running a loyalty purge over Iran criticism — but he’s not purging everyone the same way. If you’re a Republican senator, House member, or longtime loyalist and you raise e...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Viktor Orbán just lost. After 16 years of grinding Hungary’s democracy down piece by piece — captured media, bent courts, rigged the playing field while still pretending it was “normal elections” — Hungarian voters finally fired him. Orbán conceded after a crushing defeat, with Péter Magyar’s opposition moveme...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Picture the next war and forget the old imagery—tanks, pilots, generals hunched over maps. Now picture the sky filled with drones. Hundreds of them. No pilots. No radio chatter. No pause while a human decides what’s real and what isn’t. Just machines spotting targets, confirming them, and reacting—at a speed h...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com For a decade, white evangelicals were Trump’s most dependable people. Not “swing voters.” Not “maybe.” The ones who defended everything —because they weren’t just voting for a candidate, they were protecting an identity. That’s why the new numbers matter. Pew found that white evangelical Protestants still supp...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A couple people died in Minneapolis. The backlash hit fast. The administration stopped doing the most camera-friendly raids. Leadership got reshuffled. Stephen Miller vanished from TV for a while. And a lot of people took that as a win. Like he finally pushed too far and got burned. That’s the trap. Miller did...

I’m posting this conversation with Noah Taylor because Kansas is about to matter a lot more than the national media wants to admit — and because too many people still treat the Senate like it’s some abstract DC chess match. It’s not. The Senate is where accountability either happens… or dies. It’s where judges get confirmed, agencies get funded — or hollowed out — investigations get blocked or bur...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The person helping run disaster response in the United States says God teleported him to a Waffle House. Yeah. That’s where we are. Not a meme account. Not a random Facebook uncle. A senior FEMA official—someone whose portfolio includes hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and the moments when Americans have lost ev...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com If you want a snapshot of how warped our politics has become, try this on: The President of the United States is demanding $10 billion from the IRS… while running the executive branch that controls the IRS. And now the Justice Department is stuck in a scenario that should never exist in a normal system: the go...