I'm not talking about a "trusting trust" attack, which is difficult to pull off and requires special compiler knowledge because it needs to survive bootstrappin

I'm not talking about a "trusting trust" attack, which is difficult to pull off and requires special compiler knowledge because it needs to survive bootstrapping. Here the attacker just needs to patch a binary once and he already has complete control over the machine, so he has an infinite number of options: from simply manually replacing the binary file before it's uploaded to the website, to replacing gcc with a script that patches the source code before calling the original gcc.