Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes
Politics has never been more chaotic, and most podcasts just add to the noise. Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes cuts through it. Grant is an AP Award-winning journalist with over a decade of on-the-ground reporting on the biggest political stories, scandals, and elections in America. Twice a week, he takes the stories dominating the headlines and breaks them down in plain English — no jargon, no spin, no shouting. If you care about what’s happening in this country but you’re exhausted by how it’s being covered, this is the show for you. Real reporting. Clear explanations. Actual context. Make It Make Sense drops three times a week. Subscribe so you never miss it.
Episodes
When Trump released a tranche of declassified documents to support his national address claiming China stole the 2020 election, most reporters treated them as intelligence products. A 20-year CIA analyst and a former head of the National Security Council looked at them differently.
Julia Curlee spent two decades as a CIA analyst, including serving as a presidential daily briefer and director for the National Security Council...
Two stories this week, connected by one thread: what happens to people who don't follow Trump in lockstep.
Todd Blanche, Trump's personal criminal attorney who lost the New York hush money trial making Trump a felon 34 times over, may have his attorney general nomination withdrawn. Two outgoing Republican senators, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, want Blanche to sign a piece of paper agreeing to follow a federal judge's order s...
98 days to the midterms. Here is where both parties actually stand.
Republicans: Trump has a 30% approval rating and every Republican running has to tie themselves to it. The party has raised $130 million plus Trump's $400 million war chest... but Trump is withholding all of it until the Senate passes the Save America Act. The votes aren't there. The clock runs out August 4th when states enter the 90-day quiet period and can...
Eric Zuleger is back on the show! He's the reporter and analyst behind The Under Report. He spent 10 days on the ground in Lebanon during active conflict, got clearances from the Lebanese Ministry of Information, the Lebanese Armed Forces, and Hezbollah itself, and just returned. This is his first extended conversation about what he actually saw.
Grant and Eric open on Trump's election speech and what it looks like from a na...
The House of Representatives left for summer recess today. In their final 48 hours they passed three bills and sent them to the Senate.
The continuing resolution: the government stays funded at current levels until December 4th, kicking the budget fight to just before the holidays, again. The stock trading ban: it bans members of Congress from buying stocks but not selling them, which is where the money is made, and Republic...
Last weekend was the deadliest stretch of the Iran war in months. Three US service members were killed and one is still missing after strikes on US bases in Iraq and Jordan. The total US death toll is now 17, higher than the Afghanistan evacuation that nearly derailed the Biden presidency. The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had withheld nearly 100 casualties for weeks. The Wall Street Journal found that service members o...
Andrew Torrez is a lawyer and co-host of the legal podcast Law And Chaos who has spent his career watching the Roberts Court systematically reshape American law. His verdict after this term: John Roberts broke the Supreme Court from the inside, and the court is now best understood as a right-wing policy-making institution rather than a judicial one.
Grant and Andrew go case by case through the most consequential term in a ge...
Tonight Trump is giving a national address about foreign interference in the 2020 election. Grant recorded this episode to get ahead of the lies before they air.
Here's what is actually proven: In April 2021, the US Office of National Intelligence, compiled by intel officers Trump himself appointed, found with a high degree of confidence that China did not attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. The join...
Senator Lindsey Graham died Sunday morning from an aortic dissection. He was 71. Grant's assessment of his legacy is honest: a foreign policy expert who never met a war he wouldn't support, a politician who publicly and privately knew what kind of man Trump was and chose loyalty anyway. Trump's eulogy was mostly about getting a bill passed. Grant plays it.
With Graham gone, South Carolina's governor needed to appoint a repla...
On July 4th, America's 250th birthday, the White House published a report on its own website calling the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History "un-American." The report, authored by the Domestic Policy Council, said the museum focuses too much on Black and Brown communities, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ Americans, and accused it of dividing the country.
Marc Stein is the president of the Organization of American ...
The ceasefire Trump called a once-in-a-generation peace deal is over. It lasted three weeks. Grant has bread on his counter that lasted longer.
Trump declared the ceasefire officially over while at a NATO summit in Turkey, a meeting that did not go well for the United States by any measure. He threatened to cut off trade with Spain over NATO spending. He claimed the US once owned Greenland and gave it back, which is not how that...
A New York Times/Sienna poll just found that for the first time, the key states needed to flip the Senate from Republican to Democrat are either Democratic leads or within the margin of error. North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio. If Democrats flip those seats and win the House as expected, the math for impeachment starts to work.
Then everything started falling apart at once.
The Democratic candidate ...
One week before America turns 250, Congress set aside money to celebrate the country. Trump's private organization, Freedom 250, is siphoning that money into a celebration that is increasingly about him. The Great American State Fair on the National Mall was supposed to open with a concert celebrating America. Musicians pulled out. It became a Trump rally. Trump said 45,000 people attended. The actual count was about 1,000, and man...
The most bipartisan housing bill in 40 years passed the House 358-32 and the Senate 85-5. Trump himself called it "the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation in the history of our country" in a presidential proclamation two weeks ago. Republican leaders were mid-press conference, celebrating its passage, when Trump posted on Truth Social that the signing was off.
A North Carolina congresswoman showed up to ...
A convicted felon named JJ Cafaro, who runs a company called Greenwater Services, was awarded a no-bid $1.7 million contract to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool "American flag blue." It ballooned to $16 million, took months instead of a week, the paint is peeling off the bottom, and the water turned bright green with algae.
Trump's response was to blame vandals, threaten 10-year prison sentences, deploy the Nationa...
Two weeks before America turns 250, Grant sits down with NYU Law Professor Melissa Murray, co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast and one of the country's leading legal scholars, to talk about her brand new book: The US Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader.
The conversation covers what the framers actually got wrong (they were elitists who didn't trust ordinary people), what they got right ...
Trump gave his longest speech since the State of the Union at a press conference in Paris, then flew to the Palace of Versailles to sign the Iran memorandum of understanding.
For those keeping score at home: Versailles is where Germany signed its humiliating defeat at the end of World War I, the document widely credited with planting the seeds of World War II.
The White House finally released the 14-section MOU. Grant g...
Over the weekend, on Trump's birthday, the US and Iran announced they'd reached a deal to end the war. The actual text has not been released. What we know so far is that this is a memorandum of understanding, not a signed treaty, and by no measure does any foreign policy expert consider that a real deal yet.
The Strait of Hormuz, which 20% of the world's oil flows through, did not reopen immediately as promised. As of record...
Barb McQuade spent her career as a US Attorney prosecuting organized crime, including the conviction of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick on extortion, bribery, and fraud charges. Trump later pardoned Kilpatrick. In her new book, The Fix, she argues the Trump administration is running the exact same playbook she spent her career prosecuting. Her words: "it's just crime."
Grant and Barb walk through the parallels in detai...
103 days into a war Donald Trump promised would never happen, the United States is striking targets inside Iran and along the Iranian coast for the third straight day. The Secretary of Defense announced the US would target bridges and power plants. Legal scholars say those strikes are unconstitutional. International law experts say targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime.
This morning, Trump announced the US would b...
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