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I think this is cope. You want to draw a line from Caesar to Trump, but the comparison doesn't make any sense (for a lot of reasons, not just the corruption angle). Leave aside the question of whether or not Caesar was good in the long run. Caesar, in your telling, leveraged his position to try and enact reforms. By your own comparison (and also reality) Trump is not doing that. Trump is not a guy playing the game better than anyone else while pushing for reform. He's pushing for more power and getting rid of guardrails holding him back from more corruption. Instead, the argument is, essentially, that Trump being overtly terrible is a good thing because it will inspire others to enact reforms so it can't happen again.
The problem is that Trump commands the unfaltering loyalty of a base of supporters who are, to be charitable, absolutely clueless. They categorically reject any suggestion that he's corrupt. None of this "at least he's public about." No, Trump is the most honest and upright politician we've ever had. After all, he's a billionaire already. This base in turn demands public devotion to Trump to be part of the team, and if you're not an idiot that means Olympic-level mental gymnastics to rationalize the extraordinary corruption of the Trump administration.
My intuition is that corruption is always an iceberg. For every act of shameless public corruption there are a dozen hidden ones. Worse, because Trump is so blatantly, shamelessly corrupt and uncritical devotion to Trump is the bare minimum to be a Republican, you end up with a situation where one of the parties is essentially pro-corruption and actively resists attempts to fix the systems that allow Trump's abuses. If there was broad consensus that we needed to fix things in the future, the argument might make sense, but there's not and can't be because serious criticism of Trump is inadmissible in conservative politics right now. Thus we get this borderline parody of Murc's Law where Democrats are somehow at fault for Republican corruption.
Cope ... about what? As I understand it, if this is cope then I must be coping with something, such as a tragedy or the receipt of bad news. Have I received any bad news lately that I would need to cope about? I don't think I have.
This is just a theory of public attitudes about corruption in politics. I'm not saying that corruption is definitely going to be fixed for all time as a result of Trump's actions. I'm just trying to explain why so many people care so little about Trump's corruption allegations, for the benefit of the many people who seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around it.
What if this isn't true? What if there are icebergs of corruption floating invisibly beneath the surface, and political loyalty has driven people to ignore the sinking ships and pretend that nothing is wrong? In that case, the addition of a few acts of corruption above the surface (which by your own analogy is dwarfed the vast bulk of hidden corruption beneath the water) is really not that big a deal.
I think it's fair to say that if your intuition isn't true then America's government has a serious problem. Sure it would be nice if an absence of corruption out in the open meant an absence of corruption in secret, but that is a heck of an assumption isn't it? What if you're wrong?
I think your position requires you to argue that corruption in the US government wasn't widespread or problematic until Trump got involved. Which certainly is ... something that someone could say, if they felt so inclined. I find it difficult to believe.
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Your categories are incorrect. The people you claim to be "conservatives" really aren't any more- there are elements of that in their policies since they're pushing in a pro-classical-liberal direction (which is itself a conservative idea just due to age), but the factions have realigned. Traditional conservatism, as you know it, is dead.
Right now, the Conservatives are in fact the Democrat-aligned faction [education-managerial complex, bureaucrats and white-collar workers, welfare state/make-work beneficiaries], and the Reformers are the Republican coalition [military-industrial complex, kulaks and blue-collar workers, welfare state/make-work maleficiaries].
There are suggestions that he's corrupt from Conservatives. Of course, because Conservatives are extremely butthurt because the Reformers got elected, they claim corruption at every turn and expect me to believe it because of some misplaced sense of social propriety (which is just a defense mechanism, and an especially womanly one, that Conservatives expect to work- but that only works on social credit, and their social credit card's been declined after they put their response to the uncommon cold on it).
Reformers have trouble criticizing Reformers. Conservatives have trouble criticizing Conservatives. That much is known. Reformers tend to form cults of personality a lot easier than Conservatives do; that's also because Conservatives are the faction with no ideas.
And I'd be perfectly happy to accept a Conservative claim that Reform is corrupt, if it had factual backing. But I'm still not seeing it; what I'm seeing is stuff like "the law's finally getting applied fairly for once" (laws that Conservatives fought long and hard for), "institutional human trafficking efforts by Conservatives are being addressed" (remember, it's "illegal immigration" when Conservatives approve of it and "human trafficking" when they don't), and "economic progress isn't getting unfairly impeded by regulators".
I've said this with regards to "the left are all pedophiles, look at all the groomer literature" before, so I'll say it again: if the strongest evidence opponents can muster is not actually what the word means, and they are incapable of coming up with a way to describe what's actually wrong beyond hand-waving and arguments from aesthetics, then their claims should be ignored by default.
So yeah, I have a hard time criticizing Reformers for ignoring "Trump is all corrupt, look at all the [aesthetically-repellent to Conservatives] things". Criticize his erratic governance, and the smarter ones will be happy to listen to you (because that is a factually-correct claim, and one that hurts his own faction), but that's also the best they can do because, again, the Conservatives are simply in the wrong here.
You are the one consistently advancing an idiosyncratic definition of conservatism. If you want to play word games, I can't stop you, but let's not pretend it represents typical use. Republicans call themselves conservatives. They are proudly defending traditional gender roles, social hierarchies, economic arrangements, etc... Now, there is a term for a radical-yet-reactionary populist movement, but it's not 'reformer'.
More importantly, word games don't actually fix the problem. Relabeling Trump's political affiliation does not change anything he does.
This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the substance of Trump critiques.
(I don't know that anyone expects you to believe anything, since you're Canadian and thus not terribly relevant to American domestic politics)
No. There is a very distinctive cult of personality around Donald Trump that does not apply to any other politicians, Republican or Democrat. Biden caught enormous amounts of flak from both the center and left wings of his party, and the Democrats more broadly are notorious for squabbling. Republicans are a little less prone to infighting, but it is very normal to see intraparty criticism there as well (especially if you can frame it as the target not being conservative enough). Donald Trump is uniquely protected by the unwavering loyalty and epistemological deficiencies of his core supporters.
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