Every Republic in History Has Feared the Man Who Put His Face on Their Money

From Caesar's denarius to Trump's meme coin, the message is always the same: "I am the state and you damn well better both fear me and pay me tribute!"

On Tuesday the Office of Government Ethics released Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure, and the astonishingly corrupt number that jumps off its 927 pages — a length his team laughingly insists proves his “commitment to transparency” — is $1.4 billion.

That’s what he personally reported earning from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures in the single year of 2025 when he was president for roughly 11 months, dwarfing everything he took in from real estate, hotels, and golf courses combined.

The largest slice, roughly $635 million, were royalties on the $TRUMP meme coin, a “collectible” digital token — basically, a little JPG-style image he sold to the rubes — whose entire “collectible” value rests on one thing, which is his name and face stamped onto what he’s hustling as internet money.

This is one of the oldest cons in the long history of men who decided that the state and its treasury were, first and foremost, there for themselves to loot.

When Julius Caesar put his own portrait on a Roman coin in 44 BC, it struck the citizens of Rome like a slap in the face. For centuries the Republic had minted gods and dead ancestors onto its silver but never a living man, because a living ruler’s face on the money was understood as the visual representation of kingship, the mark of the very Eastern caliphates and Northern European tyrannies that free Romans claimed to despise and had risen above.

Caesar was dead within a month, stabbed on the Senate floor by men who read that image on their coins as his final abandonment of what Jefferson would have called “republican values.” He’d told them who he thought he was — a king, rather than the leader of a republic — and he’d told them via the one object every Roman handled every day.

It was, essentially, his declaration that Rome was no longer a republic, and history shows it signaled the beginning of the end of the Roman state as one ruled, at least in part, by its own people.

Trump has made the same confession, only digitized, although unlike Caesar he’s (fortunately: we are considerably less barbaric than Ancient Rome) lived to file the paperwork and brag about his picture being plastered everywhere you look.

The striking parallel here runs deeper than the Trump’s “coins” (including the $Trump and $Melania): Julius Caesar and the corrupt emperors who followed him as the Roman empire disintegrated didn’t just stamp their faces on the currency.

They extracted the wealth of ordinary Romans through that currency, shaving the silver content of the denarius a little at a time, spending the debased coins at full value, and letting the savings of farmers and shopkeepers hollow out across generations while the gilded ballrooms and the triumphal arches went up.

The emperor kept the silver. The commoner kept a coin that bought a little less bread every year. It was the cleanest wealth transfer the ancient world ever devised, and it ran straight through the ruler’s own mint.

Now look at what Trump and his hustler sons have built: a Reuters investigation found that Trump’s increasingly brazen criminal family has now pulled roughly $2.3 billion out of four crypto ventures since he returned to the White House, and — astonishing in its shamelessness — that more than a million ordinary MAGA followers who bought into those same ventures similarly lost roughly $2.3 billion.

Dollar for dollar, like a well-oiled machine.

That money didn’t vanish in some market crash or weird Fed devaluation; it moved out of the pockets of a million MAGA true believers who Trump saw as marks and into the pockets of the guy who put his face on the “coin.”

The $TRUMP token is down 97 percent from its peak. A 29-year-old software engineer in California put in $2,000 because Trump’s name read to her as a guarantee, and watched it shrink to under $120.

What took the Caesars three centuries of debasement, Trump managed in eleven months, and he didn’t even have to hide it inside the nation’s money supply.

His MAGA suckers lined up and handed their life savings over, because they thought he was a “brilliant businessman” who’d make them rich. Just like all the thousands of others he’s fleeced over the decades (many of whom ended up suing him).

Then the machinery of the state bent to protect his scams, which is what I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, where I argued that oligarchs rarely bother stealing from the treasury directly when they can simply capture the system that’s supposed to stop them. Handing America over to billionaires and corporations, after all, was the essence of Clarence Thomas’ corrupt deciding vote in Citizens United after he and his wife had taken millions themselves.

And so Trump, his kids, and his wife did it right out in the open, and not a single elected Republican or rightwing media oligarch has so far objected!

— Weeks after the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun poured tens of millions into World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s DeFi venture, the SEC quietly paused its fraud case against him.

— Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire Binance founder who’d pleaded guilty to money-laundering compliance failures, after Binance helped enrich the Trump family’s stablecoin. Two hundred million dollars of foreign money flowed in to the Trumps in that case, investigations disappeared, and pardons flowed out.

Draw that sequence on a whiteboard for any prosecutor and watch them start muttering the word “racketeering.” The silence around all of this is its own kind of obscene tell.

Elected Republicans are either in on the con or terrified of what Trump will do to them — like Caesar would have done in 44 BC — if they object to his fleecing their own voters.

Roman coins were also propaganda as much as currency, and the populace often learned a new emperor had seized power only when his face turned up on the money in their pockets.

Following Julius Caesar, a major job of the Roman mint was to broadcast the ruler’s image and thus remind everyone whose nation, whose empire, this had become.

Our modern version of that old Roman mint are Trump’s toadies who’re hanging banners of his glowering face on federal buildings all over DC and stamping his visage on this year’s passports. Not to mention the Trump gold coins he had minted for America’s anniversary and the talk of putting his face on a $250 bill.

And the right-wing media machine, so quick to fly into screaming outrage when Hunter Biden — not Joe, who took not a penny — made a mere million bucks a year for being on the board of Burisma, have gone strangely quiet about a president himself who just self-reported fleecing a million of his own supporters to the tune of billions.

The same rightwing-billionaire-owned propaganda apparatus that screamed for years about the dick-pics on Hunter’s laptop and manufactured weeks of near-hysterical outrage over Obama’s eight-page disclosure can’t summon even a hoarse whisper about a 927-page one.

Which brings me back to Rome.

In August of 1998, Louise and I spent a day wandering that city, touring the private galleries of the Vatican in the morning with one of the Pope’s personal assistants and standing inside the Colosseum in the afternoon, marveling at the engineering of an empire that ran on conquest and tribute and the flat certainty that some men were born to consume the fruits of the labor of others.

The next day we were driven up to Castle Gandolfo, the papal summer residence in the hills, where I’d been invited to a private audience with Pope John Paul II after a dear friend of his read my book The Prophet’s Way and suggested to him that we should meet. I’ve rarely felt history sit so close, or had such a great honor.

Something about that visit and the historical research I did afterward deeply reminds me of today.

The Catholic papacy rose out of the wreckage of that very Roman empire, and the title the pope now carries, Pontifex Maximus, was originally the title of the Roman emperors, held first by Caesar himself, the same Caesar who first put his face on the Empire’s coinage.

For centuries the Roman Catholic Church wore the empire’s crown and behaved like an imperial power in its own right. And then, slowly, that institution turned itself inside out: today the strongest, most honored and respected voice on Earth against the idolatry of wealth and the machinery of exploitative empire comes from that very chair.

The man sitting in it now is an American, and a genuinely decent human being. Pope Leo XIV has spent this year pointing to the richest enclaves on the planet while condemning the “idolatry of power and money,” warning against the “pursuit of unjust wealth and the illusion of dominion,” and describing an economy that lets a wealthy few live in a bubble of comfort and luxury while everyone else absorbs the losses.

An American pope wearing a Caesar’s title, calling out the sins of the Epstein/billionaire class, while a billionaire American president (and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet) wearing a Caesar’s ambitions commits Julius’ crime in a 927-page confession and laughingly calls it “transparency.”

The Romans could have told us how this story ends. When one man puts his face on the money and the buildings, captures the courts, and treats the public treasury as his personal party-fund to build vanity ballrooms and arches, the Republic has already been broken, brought to its knees, no matter what anyone still calls it.

The one advantage we hold over the first century’s Romans, however, is that we still have a vote — at least for now, in defiance of Trump’s and the GOP’s best efforts — and we still get to decide whether the crimes against the nation and his own followers that he confessed to will ever be stopped and prosecuted.

So use it. Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them that a president ignoring the Constitution to monetize his office and pardoning his donors in exchange for millions deserves immediate action.

Make sure you’re registered and ready at vote.org, and find out who’s on your state and local ballot at openstates.org: the people who can actually check this kind of power sit as often in your statehouse as in Washington.

And if this work of mine gave you a clearer way to see what’s in front of all of us, share it, forward it, and post it where the algorithm can’t quietly bury it.

Independent journalism survives because readers refuse to be lied to, and refuse to let their neighbors be lied to either. Subscribe at hartmannreport.com, support the work if you’re able, and pass it along.

This wannabe emperor has told us exactly who he is and who the lickspittles who serve him are. The only question left is what the rest of us intend to do about it.

Comments on Wednesday’s Daily Take:

I Saw This Happen Behind the Iron Curtain. I Never Expected to See It Here...

Today, thanks to a tinpot Dick-Tater, we’ve become TV’s “Mission Impossible’s” Ghalea

Ghalea was a fictional African country threatened by a massive counterfeiting scheme in the Season 2 episode “The Money Machine” (1967). [Sounds like Crypto, to me.]

~ Sir Okie Doke

This rapidly ascending police state status is a topic for a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and for social media or even local radio and TV. Thom has supplied the facts and many of the sordid details

~ Robert B. Elliott

Read the Article | See all Comments

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Click on the image above for the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is available this week in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.