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.
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Make It Make Sense with Grant Hermes
She Locked Up Detroit's Corrupt Mayor. She Says Trump Is Doing the Same Things. She Has a Fix.
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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 detail. The kickback scheme that sent Kilpatrick's associates to prison looks a lot like the DOJ's immunity deal and slush fund. The pattern of inflicting pain until someone complies, then owning them permanently, is the same pattern Barb saw with extortion victims in Detroit and the same pattern she sees in how Trump dismissed the bribery case against Eric Adams in exchange for cooperation on immigration enforcement.
But this isn't just a conversation about the problem. Barb has actual proposals: moving the US Marshal Service under the judicial branch so courts can enforce their own contempt orders, ranked choice voting to reduce the power of extremists in both parties, independent redistricting commissions like Michigan's, and term limits for Supreme Court justices that would prevent any single president from reshaping the court for a generation.
0:00 An optimistic episode, finally: meet Barb McQuade, author of The Fix
3:11 Why Barb calls this a "mob-style government" instead of authoritarianism
6:39 "It's just crime": why this framing matters and how Peter Magyar used it to defeat Orban
7:30 The Kwame Kilpatrick case: kickbacks, extortion, and the contractor who couldn't say no
11:04 The Eric Adams parallel: dismissing a bribery case in exchange for loyalty
12:17 Win by losing: how Trump flexes power even when courts block him
14:00 The real fix: bolstering Congress as the check the founders intended
17:00 Ranked choice voting and how Alaska elected Lisa Murkowski's independence
19:30 Ending gerrymandering: Michigan's independent redistricting commission as the model
21:30 Getting money out of politics: Michigan's utility contribution ballot measure
25:12 Should Democrats expand the Supreme Court? Barb's answer: term limits instead
28:51 A radical idea: moving the US Marshal Service under the judicial branch
31:52 Does this collapse from the inside, or is Trump too big to fail?
34:07 Where to find Barb's book and her podcast, Sisters in Law
The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government
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