From 'difficult to accept' to 'he's got a backbone': Tafoya's evolution on Trump

MINNEAPOLIS — Most Republicans who made their peace with the norm-busting presidency of Donald Trump did it privately. Michele Tafoya did it in front of a microphone.

Before she was a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Tafoya was a media personality with 30 years in sports broadcasting, followed by work as a podcast host.

Tafoya has a public record almost no other Senate candidate carries: nearly 600 podcast episodes and a Substack publication that shows how a Trump skeptic turned into a Trump enthusiast.

In November 2022, Tafoya published an open letter urging Trump not to run again. He had accomplished a great deal in his first term, she wrote on Substack, but his politics “went from messy to absolute mayhem.”

America was “tired of disorder,” she wrote. “We want normalcy. We want unity. We want some peace and quiet. We want decency.”

By August 2024, Tafoya reversed course, declaring, “I have come to like Trump so much more through the years.”

The arc is not unusual – much of the Republican Party traveled the same road. But Tafoya’s Trump journey is captured week by week on her podcast, showing her leap from urging Trump to stay on the presidential sideline to more full-throated support for him and his policies.

Tafoya is betting that she can break the DFL’s two-decade stranglehold on Minnesota’s U.S. Senate seats by wooing independent voters. But to win, she’ll need their support despite Trump’s low approval ratings while ensuring Trump’s key supporters go to the polls.

The Minnesota Star Tribune used artificial intelligence to review 350 hours of Tafoya’s podcast episodes published from 2022 and last January. In addition to her evolution on Trump’s leadership, she also supported the president’s immigration enforcement and budget cuts. Her opponent, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, and other Democrats have worked to characterize Tafoya as a Trump acolyte.

The Minnesota Star Tribune sent Tafoya a list of questions asking her to respond to her past statements. She responded by email saying Flanagan is “a puppet for one political party” while characterizing herself as an “outsider who is beholden to no one and will answer to no one except Minnesotans.”

“I will work with presidents of either party, including President Trump, when they get things right,” Tafoya said. “And I will call out President Trump or any other president when they get things wrong.”

Tafoya, 61, retired in February 2022 after a 30-year broadcasting career capped by working as an NBC sideline reporter for NFL games. Three months later, she launched “The Michele Tafoya Podcast.”

While Tafoya hosted personalities from the sports world, including NBC host Bob Costas and former NFL coach Tony Dungy, most of her focus was on politics. She hosted Republican candidates and officeholders, conservative thought leaders and political pundits. In recent years, much of the podcast focused on criticism of Democrats like then-President Joe Biden and Gov. Tim Walz.

But in November 2023, Tafoya talked on her podcast about her 2022 “open letter” to Trump when she encouraged him to let “fresh faces and new blood” take the presidential stage.

“I got a lot of response, some good, some bad,” she told her listeners, before noting that “it seems the more that gets thrown at Trump, the more people love him.” She acknowledged that “it is difficult for me to defend Trump because there is so much about him that is difficult to accept.”

She then defended Trump’s first-term record and pondered what Americans want in a president.

Noting that then-President Joe Biden was “telling us that the two biggest threats to us are climate change and white supremacy,” Tafoya said, “I think people are starting to ask themselves, ‘If I have to have surgery — lifesaving surgery — do I want the best surgeon or do I want the nicest surgeon? Do I want the best surgeon, even if he’s a complete a-hole?’”

By July 2024, Tafoya warmed to Trump’s candidacy. “I’m supporting Trump now with more enthusiasm,” she said the same week Trump accepted the Republican nomination for president. “The typical Democratic establishment ... is so afraid of the rocks that Trump might turn over and find things underneath that they don’t want the American people to know.”

Tafoya also began to partially mirror Trump’s contentions about protesters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She suggested many were treated unfairly despite hundreds of them breaking into and vandalizing the U.S. Capitol and attacked more than 100 police officers.

“I have been sort of agnostic on Jan. 6,” Tafoya said in June 2024 podcast. “I think some people have made too much of it, and I think some people haven’t made enough of it.”

After watching a film by conservative Hollywood actor Nick Searcy, Tafoya said “anyone who attacks a police officer deserves to go to prison or jail,” but maintained that many nonviolent protesters were treated “insanely unfairly” by the justice system, a claim made in Searcy’s film.

In her response to the Star Tribune, Tafoya said Trump should not have pardoned any of the protesters “who laid a finger on law enforcement.”

But she also pointed out that not every protester acted violently that day.

“Just like Minnesotans are against violent crime. Minnesotans are against political prosecutions and either party abusing our justice system,” Tafoya said. “Even a nonpartisan federal judge in Washington, D.C. himself expressed that treating nonviolent trespassers the same as domestic terrorists was over the top.”

When Trump was elected to a second term, Tafoya joined many Republicans who celebrated his victory.

“It’s morning in America,” she said on Nov. 6, referring to Ronald Reagan’s famous 1984 reelection slogan. “I hasten to add I’m not necessarily drawing a parallel between Reagan and Trump, but it just feels good today.”

In the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, Tafoya extolled the president’s policies. She noted that Trump’s economic plans make “common sense” and lauded Trump’s resolve.

What “we’re learning about this president is he is standing up for what he believes in,” she said on an April 2025 podcast. “He doesn’t waver. He’s got a backbone.”

Tafoya also strongly supported billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Trump created to reduce spending and eliminate government waste.

“I love this idea from the get-go,” Tafoya said of DOGE in February 2025. “I don’t care if people think (Musk) wasn’t elected — neither was Marco Rubio for Secretary of State — so what is happening is incredible.” She also said people voted for Trump knowing he would “uncover all of this wasteful spending. The grift is up.”

DOGE first aimed to cut $2 trillion, a number reduced to $1 trillion and then $150 billion. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” showed savings of $110 billion when the organization shut down in July. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said in August that DOGE’s estimated savings were incorrect or lacked supporting evidence.

In her comments to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Tafoya didn’t back away from her support for the budget cuts but said the real path to meaningful budget reforms is through legislation, not executive actions.

“I have not met a single Minnesotan who believes that our huge government bureaucracies are lean, mean and efficient and there is no waste or fraud to cut,” Tafoya said. “Minnesotans across the political spectrum are fed up with the rampant fraud and reckless spending that increases inflation and the cost of living.”

Tafoya also praised the Trump administration’s efforts in 2025 to curb illegal immigration and deport undocumented migrants who’d committed crimes.

In an early October 2025 podcast, Tafoya said people either “love” or “hate” ICE raids. She claimed to be in neither camp, but said the enforcement was “necessary,” adding “I want Tren de Aragua (a Venezuelan crime gang) out of this country. I want terrorists out of this country.”

She later criticized cities and states that have sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants and criticized ICE protestors for interfering and villainizing ICE.

“I’m with (Fox News commentator) Greg Gutfeld on this that you should call it the National Immigration Customs Enforcement, so the word is NICE instead of ICE and then people can’t villainize it as much,” Tafoya said in a late October 2025 podcast.

Tafoya ended her podcasts in January 2026 when she announced her campaign, so it’s difficult to determine her views of Operation Metro Surge as it kicked into high gear.

She now says the ICE operation in Minnesota was “completely mishandled,” that the fatal shootings of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti were unacceptable, and she was glad then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired. But she also maintains that immigration enforcement is necessary.

“America can be both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants,” Tafoya said. “Minnesotans do not have to choose between being a welcoming state and a state that prioritizes public safety. We reject the false choice from extreme fringe politicians like Peggy Flanagan who pretend we can only have one or the other.”

Tafoya didn’t specify whether she supports the Trump administration’s continued deportation efforts.

While Tafoya has spent plenty of time commenting on Trump and his policies, it isn’t clear what the president thinks of her. He has not endorsed her campaign for the U.S. Senate.

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