Indeed, Jennifer Rochon, a judge of the Southern District of New York, was compelled to intervene by court order to prevent money extracted from the taxpayers from being squandered on television broadcasts celebrating Donald Trump and stoking the midterm elections. Twenty million of those overseas dollars—funds earmarked by the people's assembly for guarding the borders and defending public security—are alleged to have been diverted by White House officials into this apparatus of personal glorification with scandalous intent. Shall I remain silent while I watch the defense of the frontiers stripped bare so that the likeness of a single magistrate may loom large on the public boards?

What else is this but to take away what belongs to some and give it to others? This was ever the aim of the usurers, of ruined citizens, of Catiline's accomplices: to convert the public treasury into private bribery. Yet his defenders assert that this is no campaign spending, but a public admonition urging citizens to love their fatherland! Immortal gods! Where in the world are we? Who ever heard so absurd an excuse? Can no one love his country, forsooth, without gazing upon the face of the president—and that financed by plunder from the public purse? They add that he is not even a candidate on the ballot at this time. As if the fairness of the assembly did not touch all citizens, or as if he had not repeatedly urged voters to pretend he was running in the person of others!

Never, when I guided the state as consul, did I allow the treasury to be held more sacred than when defending the laws themselves. You remember the severity with which I summoned the quaestors to balance their books, and the zeal with which I kept corrupt men away from the commonwealth's accounts. The treasury is the sinew of the state; if it is once thrown open to the whim of a single magistrate to pour forth largesse for his faction, free suffrage is done for, and liberty itself is finished. Rightly and with sound judgment, therefore, did that watchdog coalition and the labor union flee to the magistrate, demonstrating irreparable harm and a betrayal of the public trust.

For what difference is there between a man who distributes bribes in the Campus Martius through unlawful electoral clubs, and one who uses the machinery of supreme command to funnel the people's treasury into his own advertisements? The former offends with petty sums; the latter corrupts the franchise with the entire wealth of the republic. This is the newest species of electoral bribery, all the more grievous and pestilential because it is armed with the highest power. But the laws still stand; for as that judge rightly decreed, the scales of equity and the public interest demanded that this shameful squandering be halted at once.

Wherefore, if any good faith, if any constancy remains in the courts, we must ensure that such license spreads no further. Let the borders of the nation be guarded with the very funds the law provided; for taxes are not paid for the personal glory of one man, but for the common good. Let private ambitions yield to the sanctity of public accounts, and let all men learn, however powerful they may be, that the people's treasury is not the private estate of a ruler.