This brings to mind Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"[1] -- after all, all I have to do to write code with the exploit is be able to remove the patch and rebuild the compiler and build some executables.
Trusting in a compiler you hope was used to build all the executables on your system isn't trustworthy enough to be the final solution.
[1] https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html