Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes

18 days to November 3rd. Two stories today, both of which tell you exactly where we are.

The DOJ sent letters to California's Secretary of State and the head of elections in Los Angeles County demanding they purge more than 190,000 alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls in 48 hours, with 18 days to the election and millions of ballots already sent. The list was on a flash drive. The password was handwritten on a Post-It note stuck to the letter.

LA County has 5.8 million registered voters, more than 27 states. Federal law requires individual voter reviews during the 90-day...

21 days to November 3rd. This week started with DHS raiding the Washington DC home of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar. Grant has investigated the claims behind this raid personally. Here is what he found.

The DOJ says the warrant is judicially approved but won't say by which judge or court. The stated justification is an investigation into Omar's immigration and naturalization process from 30 years ago. Agents seized documents, campaign finance records, and electronics that have nothing to do with that stated justification. The three possible legal theories behind the raid are laid out in full: immigration fraud committed...

The number one issue for voters heading into November 3rd is the economy. The cost of everything is too high. Groceries, gas, housing, healthcare. Inflation is outpacing wages. And most of the economics coverage sounds like it's in a foreign language by design.

Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist, Bloomberg columnist, co-host of the Optimist Economy podcast, and one of the clearest translators of people-focused economics working right now. 

This conversation is about what's actually broken and what actually fixes it. Kathryn explains why the COVID recovery was the fastest in 50 to 70 years and w...

25 days to the midterms. Trump knows what's coming. And he's telling us what the last stretch looks like.

First: a mea culpa on Tuesday's episode. In trying to contextualize what Trump said about Iran and LA, it came across like Grant was defending it. He wasn't. This episode explains why accurate context matters, why sanewashing is different from journalism, and why getting it right is the whole job even when it's inconvenient.

Then: why Trump keeps saying it anyway. The LA and San Diego moment is now a rally fixture because backing down would mean...

27 days to November 3rd. Here's where things actually stand.

In the House: 49% of Americans say they're voting Democratic compared to 41% who say Republican. Decision Desk HQ puts Democratic odds of winning the House at 75%. The Cook Political Report now projects Democrats winning a 15-seat majority, somewhere between 230 and 235 seats. That's not just a wave. That's a tsunami. A 15-seat majority is practically defection-proof and gives a party with a real plan the power to actually use it.

In the Senate: four states that have sent two Republicans to Washington for years — Maine, Ohio, Iowa, and Te...

The Supreme Court's new fall term starts Monday. Melissa Murray, NYU law professor, co-host of Strict Scrutiny, and New York Times bestselling author of The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader — is back on the show to break down what's coming and to give her verdict on the Jack Smith hearing.

Her verdict on the hearing: "The political equivalent of standing in line for something dumb that you don't want to." It wasn't that Smith got raked over the coals, he handled it with his characteristic steadiness. It was four hours of...

Jack Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today for the first time since the January 6th prosecution was shut down. Republicans had hours to ask questions about one of the most consequential legal investigations in American history. Here's what they chose to do with that time.

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana went after Smith's wife for a documentary she made about Michelle Obama. Kennedy asked questions he openly acknowledged Smith couldn't answer about what Merrick Garland did or didn't do, about whether Smith lobbied for the special prosecutor job, about things that have already been contradicted...

In May, Dr. Henry Abraham and about 30 colleagues published a letter saying medical professionals have a duty to warn the public about what they are observing in the president of the United States. Five months later, Grant brought him back to ask one question: has anything changed?

The answer is no, it's getting worse. 

Everything they warned about has been consensually validated by new examples. This is not a diagnosis. Dr. Abraham is explicit about that throughout. These are clinical observations based on thousands of hours of publicly observable behavior from the most recorded person i...

Two things happened today that don't add up when you put them next to each other.

At 1 am, a federal judge ordered Trump to immediately reinstate CNN, MSNBC, and Politico's White House credentials. The order specifically said the national security justification was invented, "simply put, the record lacks factual support." The White House did not comply immediately. It waited until 12:45 pm, several hours after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping appeared together for the official welcome ceremony, ensuring the three outlets missed the biggest photo op of the week. The judge's two-week restraining order means this isn't...

Three things happened today that, on any other day in American history, would each be the only news story anyone talked about.

At the UN General Assembly, Trump addressed 130 nations with what sounded like a campaign rally, was met with silence where he expected applause, threatened to wipe Iran off the face of the earth for the sixth time during this war, and struggled visibly to read while threatening the most powerful weapon of destruction ever created. He also bragged about taking Venezuela's oil — which violates Section Two of the UN Charter, a document the United States wr...

Only 18 of 435 House seats are genuinely competitive in 2026. That means 95% of Americans go to the polls for their House race with functionally one real option. It's not because the country is that divided; it's because politicians have been drawing their own districts in a nuclear arms race of gerrymandering that has no natural end.

Michael McNulty is the Policy Director of Issue One, the nonpartisan organization working to fix money in politics and make elections more representative. This week, a bipartisan group called the Problem Solvers Caucus introduced a four-bill framework to address gerrymandering at the federal...

Today is National Voter Registration Day. Go to vote.gov right now. Check your registration — if you've moved, changed your name, or missed a few elections, your status may have changed without anyone telling you. Find out your state's deadline. Make a plan for November 3rd. Vote.gov. Do it before you forget.

Last night the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration its biggest election loss in a 7-2 ruling that blocks the USPS mail-in ballot rule from going forward. The two no votes were Alito and Thomas. Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence agreeing with the ruling but, fo...

Twenty-five years ago today, Grant was eight years old, watching the second plane hit the second tower before walking to school. He didn't know what he was seeing. He just felt the fear coming off every adult around him.

Steve Cash felt it too, but from the inside. He was Senator Dianne Feinstein's lead staffer on the cluster of legislation that followed 9/11: the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He didn't just help pass those laws. He helped write them.

Twenty-five years...

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 bizarre speeches in recent political memory, shaking, tearing at his jacket, on the verge of speaking in tongues while accusing Democrats of ripping out hearts like the...

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 accomplishments, his agenda. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is not attending. At least 70 congressional Republicans told Politico they weren't planning to go. Swing state candidates in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa are staying home to campaign.

The ones...

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 court, with the Trump administration asking the Supreme Court's shadow docket to let it go forward.

David Kligerman is the senior vice president and special counsel at WhistleblowerAid.org. He is the lawyer for t...

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 Citizens United, the organization fighting to get corporate money out of elections. She's back on the show for the second time this cycle to break down where things actually stand with 60 days to...

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 voters never receive or have their mail-in ballot returned this election cycle.

The whistleblower's most alarming claim: "Catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug." The zero failure protocol works like this: if a single...

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 president of Common Cause, the 56-year-old nonpartisan pro-democracy organization that fought Watergate reforms, ended the Vietnam War effort, and is now on the...

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 that any ballot from a state that doesn't comply will not be delivered or returned.

Second: Trump declared a national emergency to secure America's bulk...

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 public tomorrow.

One in three Americans voted by mail in 2024. Roughly 100 million people. Eight states and Washington DC run entirely vote-by-mail elections. In Utah, 95% of voters voted by mail. If USPS follows the...

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-level election interference attempts. She is fighting this fight every single day.

The most important thing she explains in this conversation is the executive override framework: the three-stage playbook Protect Democracy identified by studying 2020, Trump's behavior out of power...

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 Democratic Senate primary. She ran no corporate or PAC money, led sit-ins at the governor's office with a pink megaphone, got arrested for trespassing, and won. In South Carolina's Republican runoff, Mark Sanford — yes, that Mark Sanford, the one who went hiking...

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 president. Maggie Haberman called her Trump's "human pacifier." And when Trump hid in the catering cart in Turkey, he brought two people: Pete Hegseth, who makes sense, and Natalie Harp.

Senator Jon...

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 actually look like.

The short answer: nothing has changed. There is no new research. The split MMR vaccine Trump described doesn't exist and would take 5 to 10 years to develop. No insurance plans...

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 multiple sailors needing to be restrained after attempting to jump overboard. A town hall with the Navy Secretary revealed serious mental health and morale issues. Mail and packages have been lost for weeks, raising questions...

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 the other side, hid in a catering cart with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was loaded onto a flatbed truck, driven to a different unmarked jet, and...

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 — and left before things got really interesting. But the conversation they had while the votes were coming in is worth hearing because it's how political strategists actually think and talk about these races, 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 connection to Obama's auto industry rescue, lingering resentment over El-Sayed's ties to the Uncommitted Movement, and real skepticism about a Muslim candidate even in the state with the highest Arab-American po...

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 the US has used virtually all of its interceptor missiles — not low, not running short, nearly all of them. There is no plan and no capability to respond to a...

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 for both the Biden and Trump White Houses. Steve Cash is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and the head of The Steady State. Together they explain Steady State's new report this week...

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 shutting down the $1.8 billion slush fund and ending Trump's IRS immunity deal. Blanche has refused. The judge previously accused Trump and Blanche of colluding to use her courtroom...

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 no longer touch voter rolls. Seven Republican senators are threatening to vote against going home for summer recess. Mike Johnson told his caucus to pray.
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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 national security and information operations perspective. Eric's frame: there are three simultaneous information space operations happening right now, one from China, one from Russia, one from...

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 Republicans slipped a federal voter ID mandate into the bill specifically to make Democrats vote against it. Thomas Massie said so publicly on Twitter. The war powers...

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 on the Jordan base were being housed in sheet metal prefabricated containers. Goldman Sachs now says oil could hit $120 a barrel.

Trump, when asked about...

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 generation. Birthright citizenship: a five to four decision on a question that should have been nine to nothing, since the 14th Amendment says what it...

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 joint report from Trump's own Department of Justice and Homeland Security said they had no evidence of any foreign government compromising election infrastructure to manipulate results. John Ratcliffe, Trump's own Director o...

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 replacement. Trump wanted Graham's sister, who has spent her career on the South Carolina Commission for the Blind and the state workforce development board. She was sworn...

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 Historians, the nation's largest and most prestigious group of professional historians. He visited the museum in March. He also wrote the piece in Time Magazine about the federal assault on history...