The people have spoken and they love mud

Speaker 1 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

Speaker 3 Hi, I'm Patricia Carvallis, the host of Politics Now, the ABC's podcast unpacking the latest political news when it happens. Every weekday, you'll hear me and the sharpest political minds at the ABC.

Speaker 2 Me, Jacob Griebo, me, Raph Epstein, me, Claudia Long, me, David Spears, and me, Melissa Clark, in the chair for Fran Kelly for the party room, every Thursday.

Speaker 3 So join me for Politics Now, download and follow on the ABC Listen app.

Speaker 2 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabacal and Gadigal people.

Speaker 2 G'day, Matt Mevin here. And as you can probably hear from my voice, I am happy to report that I am all better again.

Speaker 2 The flu really sucks. It's really horrible.
Don't get it. Thumbs down to the flu.

Speaker 2 But the fact that I'm feeling better means that we are finally ready to tackle all the fabulous questions you have sent through. And there's a lot.

Speaker 2 So we're probably going to have to split it across two episodes. I've got supervising producer Cara Jensen-McKinnon here to help out with the questions.
G'day, Cara. Hello.

Speaker 4 Please never get sick ever again.

Speaker 4 I'm happy to report that we now have a cryogenic bubble around the basement to stop any contaminants getting in. So hopefully for the rest of the year, should be fine.
I'm touching wood.

Speaker 4 I don't want to jinx us, but I feel good. I feel good about the situation.

Speaker 2 So we've got some questions?

Speaker 4 We have some questions. Unsurprisingly, given the absolute dire state of the world right now, a lot of the questions we have are about one Donald Trump.
Our first one is an audio question from Sally.

Speaker 1 Hi, Matt. This is Sally from Canberra, and I have a question for you.

Speaker 1 Donald Trump's nationalist agenda seems to have gained power through the way other world leaders have pandered to him and his threats, even when it's against their own national interests.

Speaker 1 Hypothetically, what would happen if world leaders refused to give in to him?

Speaker 1 What would the consequences be if the rest of the world just accepted his tariffs and carried on with free trade everywhere else? The US is a powerful country, but could the world get by without them?

Speaker 2 Yeah, very good question.

Speaker 2 Can you basically cut the United States out, accept his tariffs, accept his proclamations, and just move on, build alliances and relationships in other ways?

Speaker 2 I think that's kind of what a lot of countries are doing. That's not something that you can do in a couple of months, though.

Speaker 2 We do still need to engage with our most important military partner, which I think is what the Albanese government has been doing in trying to engage with Donald Trump in a way.

Speaker 2 The Albanese government has been careful, I think, to not endorse Donald Trump's policies, but also they've been careful to pick areas where their government and the Trump administration are happy to cooperate and emphasize those things to the Trump administration.

Speaker 2 And they've played that pretty well. Even the conflagration over Kevin Rudd really went as well as could possibly be expected.
This was, in case, you know, somehow you missed the conflagration.

Speaker 2 Here it is. Did an ambassador say something bad about it?

Speaker 2 Don't tell me.

Speaker 2 Where is is he? Is he still working for you? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Before I came on. You said bad?

Speaker 2 Before I took this position, Mr. President.
I don't like you either.

Speaker 2 I don't. And I probably never will.
Donald Trump went for a joke there

Speaker 2 rather than shouting down or kicking out Kevin Rudd or sort of taking the approach that he took to Vladimir Zelensky in that infamous Oval Office meeting earlier this year where him and J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance tried to sort of gang up on him and intimidate him. Donald Trump went for a joke and he moved on.
Yeah. I think that's pretty much the best outcome that Australia could look for.
It really is.

Speaker 2 But I think that it's clear that Australia is looking for ways to build strategic alliances with other countries and

Speaker 2 to strengthen trade partnership with other countries as well that we see as more reliable partners. And I think that's what most US allies are doing as well.

Speaker 2 But that's not something that's going to be done this year or next year or probably at any point during this term of the U.S. presidency.

Speaker 2 I think the thing that Donald Trump has done is he's illustrated that the United States can't necessarily be relied upon to keep its promises from administration to administration. And so

Speaker 2 other partnerships are necessary. And that's something that we covered in a number of our episodes this year.
So, yeah, I mean, obviously, talking about the length of the current U.S.

Speaker 2 President's term, that leads us into talking about the next U.S. President's term.
And we have a question that's relevant to this from Joe. Hi, Matt.

Speaker 5 Love the pod. My question is, would or could Trump change the rules to allow a U.S.
president to serve more than two terms? Thanks, Joe.

Speaker 4 So basically, in news departments, I guess, during Trump's first term, we learned to really only judge him by what he does rather than what he says.

Speaker 4 And he has actually hinted a number of times, terrifyingly, that he would be interested in pursuing a third term because he says, quote, I love to work.

Speaker 4 He's started selling this year hats that say Trump 2028. And, you know, he's making a lot of jokes about it.
But the thing is, he says a lot of things.

Speaker 4 And we have to take it with an absolutely boulder-sized grain of salt because that's the vibe. Whether or not that's legal, technically, no.
So the U.S. Constitution is pretty clear on this.

Speaker 4 The 22nd Amendment states, and I'm reading here, I don't know this off by heart, no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president or acted as president for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so that second part of it is what allowed theoretically LBJ could have run in the 1968 election, been elected and ended up being the president of the United States for more than eight years.

Speaker 2 Yes. Because he obviously took over from Kennedy when Kennedy was killed in 1963.
So theoretically, you can serve more than two terms if you're the vice president and you become the president.

Speaker 4 Exactly. So that's the kind of freakish loophole that hasn't been tested in a way aside from obviously an assassination is that if J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance was to run on the presidential ticket as the candidate and Trump was to run as his running mate, they get elected, then J.D. Vance resigns.

Speaker 4 Trump then technically could become the president again. It's like a legal loophole.
There's obviously no precedent for that sort of thing, but could happen. He'll be 82.
That's incredibly old.

Speaker 4 The only other person that I've looked into that's run for more than two terms was FDR.

Speaker 4 He ran for four terms, but he died like three months into his fourth term.

Speaker 4 And it was the fact that he was around for so long and people didn't really like that that they introduced this 22nd amendment about two term limits into the constitution so yeah so i guess that is an answer to the question of can he run more than two terms but joe's question is could he change the rule kind of yeah but it would require more like a much higher representation of republicans in the congress and senate that he currently has and then it also i think requires two-thirds of state legislatures to vote for him so currently he doesn't have that high representation.

Speaker 4 The midterms are coming up. It's unlikely that he'll have that sort of representation, but you know, time will tell.

Speaker 2 But he's certainly not going to have control of two-thirds of state houses. The key thing about all this is

Speaker 2 under the rules, essentially no is the answer. Yes.

Speaker 2 But a lot of what's going on already in the Trump administration is we're figuring out you and whose army is going to force me to follow the rules. Yes.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to make any predictions about whether Donald Trump is going to serve a third term, but I think if he remains in office beyond when the next presidential election is supposed to be, it's more likely that he will do that through the process of some sort of constitutional crisis where there isn't an election.

Speaker 2 or where he postpones the election and just says, actually, I'm not leaving.

Speaker 2 Who's going to drag me out of here? I think that's more likely than him finding some way to change the rules to allow him to actually stay in for more than two terms.

Speaker 2 I think a lot of the things that he's been doing in this first year of this term have been about testing the limits of what he can get the system to do for him by ordering the National Guard into various cities, by deporting people, by pushing the limits of habeas corpus and pushing the limits of whether he's willing to do what a judge tells him to do.

Speaker 2 I think defying the rules is more likely than him changing the rules. Exactly.

Speaker 4 So we have another

Speaker 4 question on Trump from Helen over email.

Speaker 1 My question is, is there a link between the accusation that Russia interfered with the 2016 US election and Trump's unwillingness to support Ukraine?

Speaker 2 It's a very interesting question, Helen.

Speaker 2 Because, I mean, the US Congress, bipartisan US congressional investigations and non-partisan legal investigations have all determined that Russia did try to assist Donald Trump to win the 2016 presidential election.

Speaker 2 The degree to which they actually affected the outcome, obviously, is debated. And no evidence has ever been found of any actual connections or collusion between the Trump administration and Russia.

Speaker 2 That being said, Donald Trump knows that Vladimir Putin tried to help him.

Speaker 2 And Donald Trump, ever since then, has been talking about Vladimir Putin as though he is a friend, as though he is an ally in some way, or at least as though he is not an enemy.

Speaker 2 And his beliefs about the relationship that he thought that he had with Vladimir Putin led him to, early on this year, take Putin's side in a number of key disputes.

Speaker 2 claim that he would be able to force a ceasefire and the end of the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 2 I think the shock that he has experienced, particularly in the last couple of months since the summit in Alaska, the meeting between the two of them, is that Vladimir Putin doesn't care at all what he wants.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump cares potentially what Vladimir Putin wants, but it is not reciprocal. He has no influence over Vladimir Putin whatsoever.
It is not a two-way relationship.

Speaker 2 And I think Donald Trump has been surprised by this.

Speaker 2 I think he thought that there was some way that he would be able to come to an agreement where, you know, Vladimir Putin would potentially keep a certain amount of Ukrainian territory.

Speaker 2 Ukraine would not be allowed to sign up to NATO and Ukraine would not have any particular attachment with the West.

Speaker 2 Ukraine would potentially be at least vaguely under the sphere of influence of Russia. He was sort of working towards some sort of a resolution.

Speaker 2 He was trying to bully the Ukrainians into accepting that. But then when he took that proposal to Vladimir Putin, Putin went,

Speaker 2 sorry. No, no, I want more than that.
I want all of it.

Speaker 4 Did I stutter when I said what I want exactly?

Speaker 2 Did I, yeah, was I unclear when I tried to invade all of Ukraine?

Speaker 4 Yeah, did you miss that?

Speaker 2 Did you miss that point?

Speaker 2 I think Donald Trump is getting very frustrated by Putin's unwillingness to listen to his point of view, which is why I think that you're seeing an increasingly close relationship between Trump and Zelensky, a real warming of that relationship, and a bit more hostility from Donald Trump in terms of what he's saying about Vladimir Putin, because I think he was expecting...

Speaker 2 to have some sort of influence over Vladimir Putin. He thought that Vladimir Putin cared what he thought, cared about his opinion a lot more than it turns out Vladimir Putin does.

Speaker 2 So the only link, I think, between Russia's interference in the 2016 election and the situation now is that Donald Trump thought that it would be a lot easier to get along with Vladimir Putin than it turns out.

Speaker 4 Exactly.

Speaker 4 And last week, you can really tell that things are changing, that Trump is becoming particularly salty about the relationship because he has just announced sanctions on Russian oil reserves and the trade of those

Speaker 4 oil.

Speaker 2 So you can tell that things are getting serious yeah yeah he's turning the screws he's starting to actually try and use or at least show that he has some sort of leverage over vladimir putin which he has never done before he has only ever gone he and i will be able to just meet and agree on things he now is apparently realizing that vladimir putin doesn't care about him yeah it's actually not very nice no vladimir putin really is only interested in what's good for him and and and putin doesn't respect him at all exactly which i think is something that that a lot of people have been trying to tell him for a very long time that Putin is not someone to be trusted.

Speaker 2 It's taken Trump eight years to realize it.

Speaker 4 He had to figure out himself. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We've got another Trump theme question from John over email. In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting, the alleged shooter has frequently been described as a registered Republican voter.

Speaker 2 In Australia, we enroll to vote with no party affiliation. How does this system work in the US?

Speaker 4 Yes. So basically,

Speaker 4 much like Australia, you have to enroll to vote. So obviously, we have compulsory voting.
In the US, they do not. But in quite a few states in the US, you also subscribe to a party affiliation.

Speaker 4 And in doing that, you can be either a Democrat or a Republican, and that allows you to vote in their primaries,

Speaker 4 which allows you basically to choose whoever the pre-selected candidate is for that state. You may have watched the presidential primaries debate.
You get to vote in those as well.

Speaker 2 But the key thing to note about this is that when you have a party affiliation, when you register as a Republican, that doesn't mean that you have any financial relationship with the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 You aren't a member of the Republican Party. You don't need to go to any meetings or anything like that.
You don't need to pay the Republican Party any money.

Speaker 2 All you're saying is, I wish to vote in the Republican Party primaries. Exactly.
Which is different to Australia.

Speaker 2 If you want to have any say in who any political party in Australia pre-selects for any seat, you need to be a paying member.

Speaker 4 Yes, exactly. And you also don't actually need to vote for the Republican Party when it comes down to presidential elections.

Speaker 4 It's just that you have the capacity to vote in those primaries, which if you're not party-affiliated, you can't do that.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of discussion, of course, about people who

Speaker 2 live in states that are not competitive between the Republicans and the Democrats. For example, in this case, Utah.
Utah is not a state that votes for Democrats very often.

Speaker 2 So voting in primaries is often the only way for you to have much of a say in who your representative is going to be.

Speaker 2 And so there's a lot of instances of people who are potentially, you're going to vote for the Democrats in the general election, but you know that the Democrat isn't going to win.

Speaker 2 So you want to have a say in who the Republican candidate is.

Speaker 2 And so you may go to the primary election and vote for a more moderate candidate because you want a more moderate candidate to be your representative or your governor or something like that.

Speaker 2 And there's a lot of examples of people doing that in states where it's not competitive between the two parties that are in the general election.

Speaker 4 Bit of change of pace. So we obviously had a lot of Trump political questions, but we also had a surprising amount of emails about the mud in Ukraine.

Speaker 4 I'm willing to say and admit now that I was wrong about the fact that that was going to be very interesting to a lot of listeners, hand on heart. We've had a lot of emails, and look, I'll wear it.

Speaker 2 I was wrong.

Speaker 2 It's not just you. People love mud.
People love mud, but also you're not the first person to cut it out.

Speaker 4 Exactly, exactly. Do we need to do a five-part series? Maybe.

Speaker 2 Look. Maybe.

Speaker 4 But our first mud-themed question is from a guy called Matt. Also, he asks, Sochenosum, has there ever been a war over Canada's hotspot? Is that what interests Trump in taking Canada?

Speaker 4 Why is the mud concentrated in these particular hotspots?

Speaker 2 Interesting question. So I will say, unless you've listened to our episode about Ukrainian mud, this is not going to make any sense to you at all.
So

Speaker 2 if you want to understand what I'm going to say over the next minute, then you might need to go back and listen to that episode.

Speaker 4 It's a good one. People love it.

Speaker 2 It's a banger. So Chernosim, it's this extremely fertile type of soil that is heavily concentrated in Ukraine.
It's something that makes Ukraine very attractive for invading forces because its

Speaker 2 soil is so fertile. And it's also something that makes Ukraine very difficult to invade because it turns into very thick mud when there's any rain.

Speaker 2 There is also a large concentration of Chernosim in Canada. Has there been a war over it? Not that I'm aware of.
No. Is that what interests Trump? Almost certainly not.

Speaker 2 I don't think Trump is paying a lot of attention to soil concentration. I think Donald Trump is just more interested in

Speaker 2 unifying the entire North American continent under his control.

Speaker 2 Why is the mud concentrated in these hotspots anyway?

Speaker 2 To answer that, I've actually gone and done a little bit more research. I have read a paper called Pedagenesis of Chernosomes in Central Europe.

Speaker 2 Now, pedagoges is a term which refers to the forming of soil.

Speaker 2 And the answer to that question is nobody knows.

Speaker 4 Great study.

Speaker 2 So, what this is, it's a review of 100 years worth of study into what causes chernosum.

Speaker 2 Basically, they've come to the conclusion that none of the previous studies are accurate and that nobody really knows what causes this particularly excellent soil.

Speaker 2 The one thing that I would like to know about Chernosim is if you look on Wikipedia, there is a number of references to there being a hotspot of Chernosum

Speaker 2 around the town of Nimiterbell in southern New South Wales.

Speaker 2 Sort of the Monero region. We're talking about sort of between Canberra and the coast, near Cooma.
There's this town called Nimitabelle.

Speaker 2 And on Wikipedia, they talk about there being a concentration of it in this area.

Speaker 2 And the issue is, and I wanted to talk about this, I was like, yeah, I want to go and check out this chernosum in Nimitabel.

Speaker 2 But the problem is, like, none of the links, you know, when you click on the links in Wikipedia to find, you know, what it's referencing, none of them actually go to any hard evidence of there being any chernosum in Nimitabel.

Speaker 2 So what I want to know is, can someone send us some actual hard data about chernosum in Nimitabel?

Speaker 2 Or why is someone spreading misinformation about Chernozim Inimitabel?

Speaker 4 That's the first episode of the series, by the way. You'll be a guest.

Speaker 2 Yeah, episode one. Episode one.
Misinformation about Chernozim Inimitabel. That's right.
That's the point. We're putting out episodes about Chernozim inimitabel.

Speaker 2 That's when you know that we have truly lost. That's right.
But there you go. I hope that answers your question a little bit, Matt.

Speaker 2 I don't know that it did, but you'll hear about it in the five-part series. Okay.

Speaker 4 One final question. It's from Alicia.

Speaker 6 Hi, Matt and team. This is Alicia from Port Macquarie.
I really liked the Mudd episode. Are there any other stories like that that you've been trying to get into an episode but keep having to cut out?

Speaker 2 None as much as the Ukrainian mud, to be fair.

Speaker 2 I don't know that there's many other stories that I keep writing in and they keep getting cut out.

Speaker 2 That being said, there are a lot of stories that I've written into episodes and they have been cut out. And I'm taking a two-pronged approach to this.

Speaker 2 One is that I'm putting them into these episodes, our Tuesday episodes. And the other approach is that I've written them all into a book, which is going to be coming out next year.

Speaker 4 Exciting.

Speaker 2 Yes, I know, I know, very exciting. So the answer to your question is yes, and that I am compiling them all into a book for you to buy and read.

Speaker 2 That's all we've got time for at this stage. We had so many questions that we'll definitely put into more QA episodes in the future.

Speaker 2 If you've got a burning question about the news or how we make the show or about MUD, please send a voice note or an email through to ifyou'relistening at abc.net.au and we'll try and answer it on the show.

Speaker 2 We will catch you Thursday with an episode about AI.