Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes

Night one of the first-ever Republican midterm national convention in Dallas is in the books. Grant was watching so you didn't have to. The arena was half full for most of the night and about 75% full during Trump's speech. Trump posted that it was sold out and beat the NFL season opener in ratings. The NFL numbers haven't been released yet. Tim Scott delivered one of the most bizar...

Something that has never happened in American history is underway in Dallas right now: the first-ever midterm Republican National Convention. Past midterm conventions have been about righting the ship, the party coming together, figuring out its message, getting organized. This one is about Trump. He is the keynote speaker both nights. The topics on the schedule are his policies, his accomplishmen...

EDITOR NOTE: This episode was recorded before a federal judge in Massachusetts issued her ruling blocking the mail-in ballot rule.  North Carolina and Delaware started sending out mail-in ballots today. Two weeks from now, most other states will follow. And the USPS mail-in ballot rule that a whistleblower says was built to "catastrophically fail" is still being fought over in federal co...

The 2026 midterms are on track to be the most expensive in American history, $12 billion in ad spending alone, before counting what's sitting in PACs and super PACs. 100 billionaire families are contributing over 20% of total election spending. Most of it is dark money: you don't get to know who donated, why, or what they're asking for in return. Tiffany Muller is the head of End Ci...

A USPS whistleblower, protected by Whistleblower Aid, came forward today with allegations that in order to meet the September 1st deadline for the new mail-in ballot rule, the Postal Service violated a federal court order, developed an untested screening system under what insiders called a "shit show" timeline, and implemented a zero failure protocol that could mean millions of American...

This week has been one of the most chaotic and fast-moving weeks in the fight over how Americans will vote in November. The USPS mail-in ballot rule went final. A judge blocked it. The Supreme Court lifted that block. Another judge put it back in place. All in the space of four days. And through all of it, Common Cause has been in the middle of the legal fight. Virginia Kase Solomon is the preside...

68 days to the midterms. The road to Republicans keeping the House is all but closed. And this week the White House made a series of moves that look like the early stages of declaring a national emergency around the election. First: the USPS mail-in ballot restriction rule went into effect despite no federal framework for it to operate in and no time for states to comply. USPS is telling states th...

On Monday the Supreme Court issued an unsigned shadow docket opinion lifting a federal judge's block on Trump's new postal service rule, the one that would let USPS decide not to deliver or return mail-in ballots. The conservative majority didn't say the rule is legal. They said the challenge came too early because USPS hadn't published its final rule yet. That final rule goes...

74 days to the midterms. Alexandra Chandler is the Director of Free and Fair Elections at Protect Democracy, a former Naval Intelligence officer and former intelligence analyst under the Secretary of Defense. Her organization is currently suing the Trump administration over the postal service mail-in voting rules, the voter roll data grabs, FCC regulatory threats against media, and multiple state-...

Primary season is officially over. 75 days to the midterms. In Alaska, former Democratic Congresswoman Mary Peltola got more first-round votes than sitting Republican Senator Dan Sullivan in a race nobody thought would be competitive. Alaska is officially a toss-up. In Florida, Democratic Socialist state representative Angela Nixon beat Alexander Vindman — who outraised her 16 to 1 — in the Democr...

Natalie Harp. She's a 35-year-old White House staffer who credits Donald Trump, not her doctors, with saving her life from bone cancer. She slept in the women's locker room of Trump's Bedminster golf club during the 2024 campaign to be physically closer to him. She leaves devotional notes in his documents and in his lunch. The Secret Service flagged her as a potential threat to the...

When the White House announced its new vaccine recommendations this week, Grant knew he needed someone who actually understands what these diseases do to human bodies. Dr. Scott Greer is a professor of public health policy and comparative politics at the University of Michigan, and he joins the show to explain what the new schedule actually means and what the diseases it leaves unprotected against...

The USS Abraham Lincoln has been deployed for 250 days without making port. Sailors are supposed to dock every 30 to 45 days to resupply with food, fresh water, and rest. Instead, families of the nearly 5,000-member crew have reported sailors being served a quarter cup of pulled pork and two tortillas, mold on board, broken toilets and laundry, a shortage of hygiene products and water, and multipl...

Two stories this week. One is absurd. One is alarming. Both are real. The New York Times, backed by multiple outlets, reported that during Trump's NATO trip to Turkey last month, the threat from Iran on Air Force One was so credible that the Secret Service didn't want Trump on the plane at all. So instead of boarding Air Force One and staying on it, Trump walked through the plane, exited...

This is the election night conversation. On Tuesday, as the Michigan primary returns came in, Grant sat down live with Mike Madrid from The Great Transformation and Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party and Lincoln Project co-founder, to watch the Abdul El-Sayed vs. Haley Stevens race in real time. They called El-Sayed the winner before the night was over — an...

Abdul El-Sayed beat Congresswoman Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary by one point. He had a 15-point lead in polls going in. Grant was on the ground for election night and breaks down exactly what happened, why the race was so much closer than expected, and why the gap between the polling and the result almost certainly came down to Black voters in and around Detroit — their c...

Four stories today, none of them good for anyone in charge. On Iran: Trump said the US was on the verge of its largest attack since World War Two. He called it off just before markets opened Monday. A CNN exclusive revealed the Pentagon is now asking rank-and-file troops for "creative and unconventional" ideas for how to punish Iran because there is no plan. A Reuters exclusive revealed...

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 t...

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 agreei...

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...

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 s...

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...

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 J...

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 mos...

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...