Eating an Apple

Eating an apple seems such a peaceful and healthful thing to do, meditative almost, bringing to mind pleasant weather and untrammelled hours, that it is surprising to contemplate how many negative associations crowd behind the positive ones. For a start, one tradition has it that all humankind’s ills began with the eating of one, in the Garden of Eden, though the original account in the Bible is botanically unspecific; it would be more appropriate if it had been a passion fruit – the etymology of ‘passion’ has suffering at its root – or at least a mango, which carries by assonance with ‘malign’ some hint of trouble to come.

Or consider the fact that an IRA assassin was convicted on the evidence of an apple left at the place where he lay to take his shot at his target; the half-eaten fruit had his bite clearly imprinted on it, matching his dental records. A pause to consider the circumstances of this: evidently the IRA sniper was half-way through munching an apple when his target appeared, prompting him to abandon the snack to commit murder, leaving it there with the shell from his cartridge as he made a getaway. He would scarcely have paused to eat half an apple after shooting his victim.

Most pertinent for present purposes is the phrase ‘rotten to the core’. Apples are re-eminently the fruit with a core, and a fine-looking apple sporting the tiniest of blemishes on its surface, where the worm first burrowed, can be blackly corrupt within. Most corruption has this character. To detect it one has to cut into the fruit. But in authoritarian regimes those in charge are less concerned about hiding their corruption, for any one or all of a set of reasons: people are afraid to look, or have been so gas-lit that they do not see it as corruption anyway, or are powerless to do anything about it, or have come to regard it as so normal that it is not worth complaining about.

In the Trump 2 regime corruption is frothing, bubbling, oozing out of the system in plain sight. The apple seethes with it. To the immense credit of Senator Chris Murphy (Democrat of Connecticut) a long list of the corrupt actions of Trump and Musk since 20 January 2025 was read out on the floor of the Senate on Thursday 6 March. It appeared on YouTube at:

https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=hycoCYenXIs&pp=QAFIAQ%3D%3D

but when you paste this in to your browser you get the message ‘This video isn’t available any more’. Hmm. I wonder why. I wonder whether whoever is in charge of YouTube……….

Anyway, I watched the video before it mysteriously disappeared, and this is what Senator Murphy listed:

- Trump’s meme coin (accruing money to Trump personally from anonymous sources, a way for individuals from anywhere in the world to buy influence)

- oil and gas industry gave Trump $1 billion in campaign funds; on 20 Jan Trump unveiled an energy strategy favouring oil and gas and undercutting renewables (e.g. freezes all permits on wind energy generation)

- Trump fires 17 Inspectors General, the people who investigate corruption in Federal agencies

- Trump fires head of the National Labour Relations Board, before which Musk and several other of the oligarch bros have (had?) a number of active cases pending

- Trump awards $$$ of stock equity to several of his cabinet members in his company Media and Technology Group

- Weaponization of the Department of Justice – cases against Musk & a Republican congressman dropped, the DoJ starts Operation Whirlwind to investigate anyone who criticises Trump, Musk and DOGE

- Trump fires director of CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Board), which was investigating Musk and other billionaires

- Trump has his business partners in the golf leagues meeting in the White House; not a matter of government but important for Trump’s personal business

- Criminal enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act to be limited, allowing US officials to receive money from foreign sources (in Trump 1 several officials fell foul of this law)

- Eric Adams mayor of NY let off the hook in return for pledge of loyalty to Trump; done en plein air on TV; several DoJ officials resigned in protest

- Trump tells DoJ to pause enforcement of laws on US companies bribing governments overseas

- Government to buy $400,000,000 worth of armoured Teslas from Musk

- Musk’s personal appointees in DOGE infiltrate Dept of Labour and get access to private data of millions of people & enforcement data relating to Musk’s companies

- 20 people fired by DOGE from FDA which is investigating Musk’s Neuralink device: chilling intent – DOGE announces that cuts at FDA could be 50% of personnel

- IRS to be cut by 7000 personnel, the biggest chunk consisting of those who assess taxes of billionaires and corporations

- advertising on Musk platforms jumps: the thought is that companies are trying to get in Musk’s good books

- CDC advisory committee on vaccinations is cancelled and not rescheduled: JFK2 has a company that advises people on vaccination-harm claim cases

- Trump continues to sell merchandise e.g. MAGA hats, bibles etc.

- Musk has the FAA cancel Verison contract and give it to his company Starlink

- Guests are paying $millions for dinner with Trump at Mar-el-Lago; Trump offers personal meetings to anyone who pays £5,000,000

- all the above in the first 6 weeks of the Trump 2 presidency.

As Murphy says, ‘This is how democracies die’.

He points out: ‘Corruption happens, has happened – but on this scale, and this openly – it’s not OK.’ (Understatement a new import to America apparently.)

That the Trump-Musk regime in the US is rotten to the core is not a secret. By the way: in the swirls and eddies of is effects, it reaches far, all the way to my own Twitter account: I’ve been banned from Twitter/X for reposting (reposting, note) a post about Musk’s corrupt behaviour. I’d stayed on the platform not wishing to yield the ground to the illegitimi (whom we must not allow to carborundum) and in fact am not much bothered about being booted off, though 150k followers was a handy reach for lancing boils of indignation and mentioning new books etc. – but as one little pixel in the big picture of an ugly new world it has a personal resonance, though minor.

The stink of corruption floats far, and doesn’t fade. Meanwhile it taints everything, spreads its poison, undermines us all. The message has to remain: Resist.