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The Reincarnation of Julius Caesar or: Why So Many People Give Trump a Pass for Corruption
This is partly in response to the post by TheAntipopulist below, but at the same time I'm about to go off on a tangent about Julius Caesar so I thought I'd make this top level.
Donald Trump is, undeniably, the most openly corrupt President in modern US history. What I mean is, no other President has been so corrupt and yet done so little to hide it. He isn't even pretending not to be crooked.
So why do so many people not seem to care?
Let's go back in time 2,000 years and talk about the assassination of Julius Caesar.
To set the stage: Caesar was a charismatic politician in ancient Rome who rose to be the leader of the Populaire faction. As a Populaire he favored redistribution from the rich to the poor, especially in the form of land reform. He also practiced what he preached, giving lavishly to the people of Rome. Notably, he left a huge amount of money to the people in his will, a cash sum to every citizen that was large enough to make a difference in the lives of the poor. And this clause in his will was a secret - people only found out about it after he was assassinated! That means it wasn't just performative or ambitious, he really meant it.
He was also one of the most shameless criminals in Roman history.
As his opponents never ceased to point out, Caesar's conquest of Gaul was built on a series of wars that he illegally started without consulting the Senate. He bragged about how he could get away with anything by bribing judges and politicians. When two of his opponents won both of the two Consular seats (essentially co-Presidents), Caesar bought one of them off with a king-sized bribe and used him to block the other's legislative agenda with his veto power.
I want you to imagine the scope of this with an analogy: A younger Donald Trump gets himself elected to Congress and marches an army into Mexico on a flimsy pretext (invasion of illegal immigrants!). He starts a blatantly illegal war using a combination of US troops and local Mexican auxiliaries, and becomes a trillionaire by enslaving millions of Mexicans and plundering their treasure. Then an unfriendly Democratic government under Bill Clinton tries to attack him by passing a bill condemning his actions. In response, Trump pays President Clinton off with a bribe of 100 billion dollars and Clinton uses his veto to block the bill that he himself just proposed, and, in fact, campaigned on.
That is how corrupt Julius Caesar was.
The thing is, everyone else was also corrupt. Corruption was a load-bearing element of Roman politics. In order to win office, a politician needed to pay out bribes, throw games, build temples, and so on. This usually involved borrowing money or owing favors. It was inevitable that when that politician came to power and those debts came due he would need to leverage his office to repay what he owed. In other words, everyone was corrupt. Literally everyone.
Enter the Optimates, Rome's other major political faction.
The Optimates were against corruption in theory, but in practice they were also all corrupt. What they really wanted was quieter, less disruptive corruption. To keep it at a manageable level. To them, the way Caesar went around flaunting his crimes was the real problem. It was one thing to pay off a few Senators, but buying a Consul was going too far.
The thing is, the Optimates also reflexively opposed all attempts at actual reform. Caesar was the one who passed sweeping anti-corruption legislation that put limits on how much politicians could squeeze out of their offices, and even his opponents couldn't deny that these reforms were necessary.
It was not really a dispute about whether corruption was acceptable or unacceptable. I would argue that the Optimates' desire to sweep it all under the rug was actually a step in the wrong direction. Caesar talked about corruption openly, and having a problem out in the open is the first step to solving it.
Later on, Caesar was serving as proconsular governor of three provinces. This office made him immune from criminal prosecution, so even when his opponents were able to take power he was safe. But the Optimates knew that Caesar would run for Consul again as soon as the mandatory ten-year gap between Consulships expired. They wanted to stop him from passing more reforms or wealth redistribution schemes, and they knew that there was no possible chance that Caesar wouldn't win his election in a landslide, so they decided to find a way to get rid of him.
They found a dubious legal ambiguity that they argued would allow them to take away Caesar's immunity and bring him back to Rome to face trial. After a lengthy debate, the pro-Optimate Senate suspended the law and the Constitution and declared their version of martial law (the Senatus Consultum Ultimum) to force Caesar to step down. Caesar surprised them by marching on Rome with his army, and the rest is history. After a civil war, which Caesar won, and an election, which he also won, his enemies stabbed him to death on the floor of the Senate house.
But when they paraded through the streets declaring that a tyrant had been killed and Rome was free, they were not greeted by the cheers they were expecting. Wasn't Caesar ambitious? Wasn't he corrupt? Wasn't he plotting to make himself a king? Why didn't the people of Rome hate him like the Optimates did? Why weren't they happy the tyrant was dead?
Because the people of Rome were not happy with the status quo. They didn't care about the Republic, because that was just a system for deciding which wealthy aristocrats would get to oppress them. They didn't care about the law, because that was just a system for deciding how the wealthy aristocrats would get to oppress them. They only cared that Caesar had given them games, feasts, and victory over the Gauls, and now he was dead.
Even the Optimates didn't try to deny that Caesar's reforms were necessary. They damned his memory but did not repeal his anti-corruption legislation.
Caesar's assassins did not get to enjoy their victory for long. When Caesar's will was read in public and the people of Rome found out that every adult male citizen had been left a part of Caesar's vast fortune, it started a riot. Caesar's assassins, who had attended the funeral in a show of peace and unity, had to flee the city in fear for their lives.
In the end, the people of Rome would riot to demand that Caesar's adopted son, Caesar Augustus, be installed as king. That's how little they cared about the Republic.
Augustus himself put the rebellion down. He didn't want or need to be king. He had already rigged the vestigial Republic so that he could rule in everything but name. The Roman Empire would go on pretending it was still a Republic for several centuries.
What to take from this? I don't think you can just measure two sides against each other and say, "This side is more shameless and blatant in their corruption, so they should be criticized more harshly." On one hand you could say that defying anti-corruption norms will erode them and make our society more corrupt. But on the other hand, bringing it out into the open might be necessary to kill it.
Now that Donald Trump is openly messing with US tax policy for personal gain with his combination of tariffs and insider trading, maybe that will be the catalyst to finally pass laws against using secret government intelligence to make money trading stocks. Maybe if it stayed at the level of Nancy Pelosi doing it under the table it would have gone on forever, but now that it's so blatant and so offensive it can be eliminated in one chaotic decade.
My intuition is that public crimes are actually less bad than secret ones. I would rather have it all out in the open.
I would argue that basis of the political system of Rome, the patron-client relationship, was already as corrupt as any mafia by our understanding. Basically, if a rich patron family sponsored a political campaign for the scion of a client family, the expectation certainly was that the scion would use his office to further the interests of his patron. Perhaps not always in the most blatant way possible, but a magistrate who one day decided to make decisions on their merits for the Roman people only would certainly be seen as a disgrace to his family.
This was forever the issue with land reforms: whoever gave land to the masses would by Roman convention become their patron, and thus gain enormous political power.
Now, there is obviously a difference between having a long-standing client family and just buying a consul with cash, but it is a difference in degree, not in kind. A platform to stomp out corruption (as we understand it) in Rome would go as well as a platform to abolish the navy in the British Empire.
American politics are generally much less corrupt than Roman ones were. Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are. My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.
Trump II is different from this. Sure, all the anti-immigration stuff is purely ideological, and if you count the personal ego of Trump as part of the ideology, a lot more of his squabbles are also non-corrupt. But all this tariff back-and-forth seems like it was mostly for the purpose of ripping of the stock market, and the airliner thing was on a "we do not even bother to pretend otherwise any more" level.
You could say the same about crucial issues in Rome at that time such as let's say land reform or distribution of wealth from kingdom of Pontus. On surface level it was a discussion of ideological conflict between optimates and populares, but in the end the conflict was about which faction will distribute wealth and maintain power.
For instance during latest elections 92% of votes of people in DC landed in favor of Democrats - these are all people staffing all the most powerful federal institutions. You can go one-by-one with other institutions depending on public money be it public schools, academia etc. It is by now basically captured by one of the parties. You may downplay it such as merit or ideology, but the fact is that people governed by bureoucracy have different views from those who rule them. This also means that members of one political party extract resources from general population and distribute them toward their own client network of sympathizers.
In a sense the system is already corrupted. When they saw Caesar giving them personal promise of benefits they saw it as more tangible and in a sense even less corrupt compared to some vague promise of of reward by the republic controlled by people they viewed as actually corrupt.
The gentrified bits of DC where the young childless feds live is about 70% Dem. The reason DC is 92% Dem is not the feds (most of whom commute in from the suburbs), it is the black vote turned out by the Marion Barry political machine.
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