The US Treasury at night. Photo credit: Illustration by WhoWhatWhy from APK / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), IRS (PD), and Constitutional Convention / Wikimedia (PD).
Jonathan D. Simon 04/08/26 (whowhatwhy.org)
What if millions just said No and opened escrow accounts?
I’ve been wending my way toward the exit of the TurboTax fun house, as I do every year in preparation to send the US Treasury and the California Franchise Tax Board what my partner and I wind up owing as law-abiding taxpayers.
It turns out I owe a fair amount this year, as none of my income comes from W-2s or has otherwise been subject to withholding.
I have decided not to pay it, and I am writing this column to explain why.
Let me begin by stating that this has been a very difficult decision. I’ll be 70 next year and I have always paid my taxes, in full, on time — even in years when I passionately objected to what the government was doing with my check.
Like when George W. Bush invaded Iraq and rammed through the Patriot Act along with massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich.
I grumbled, I even yelled, but I sent. Because taxation — however determined and apportioned, and however spent — is fundamental to the compact that binds us into a nation. It is, in a sense, the price of representation.
In our form of democracy, both our voice and our funding are mediated, indirect. We vote for the leaders we believe represent our values and priorities and we fund the project as they devise it, holistically, as one big package. Anything else — picking and choosing, consenting and refusing — would spell chaos.
The Line Has Been Crossed
So what has changed? Why am I now moved to violate this well-understood commitment by which I have abided my whole working life?
Put very simply, the federal government, under President Donald Trump, has made itself my enemy — the mortal enemy of everything I hold dear, everything I value. It’s that serious.
Every day I wake to some fresh hell spawned from his evil madness. And every day — literally every day — I rage anew. With the helpless impotence of a spectator at a slaughter. Yes, I march every now and then; yes, when decorum permits, I talk to others; yes, I write — but I talk and write mainly to those as outraged as I am.
And I warn, and warn, and warn.
But isn’t the time for warning over? All that I’ve warned about, throughout and long before this abomination of a presidency — is here. And its breadth and depth are damn near unfathomable.
Yes, it will get worse. There’s your warning. But, if someone doesn’t get it by now, I doubt anything I can say or write will do the trick.
So I feel, much if not all of the time, as if I am doing nothing. Nothing public enough to matter. I am taking little or no risk. Like Rick, in Casablanca, I have been sticking my neck out for nobody.
I’m Done
I’m done with that. Done with being a Good American. And done with financing an evil regime led by a madman, as it destroys all the things I love. As it blackens my hope for the future. While bringing untold suffering to those helpless to fend it off.
I have seen online chatter about a tax revolt this year. And I’ve tracked down a few organizations devoted to this tactic. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made news as 2025 drew to a tumultuous close by calling for a tax revolt among disillusioned Trump supporters. The New York Times deemed the matter worthy of a full-length news article last month.
I’ve also repeatedly advocated for mass economic action against the Trump regime, as being far more effective, and for the most part less risky, than physical demonstrations.
Mass protests have been remarkably peaceful thus far — but the potential for violence, provoked by either side, always exists, along with the potential for that violence to spread and lead to the kinds of crackdowns that authoritarians like Trump relish.
Nor, for all the show of goodness, decency, caring, empathy, and community that the No Kings and other rallies have manifest, have they succeeded in stopping the madness. God bless the people of Minneapolis and their courage, but ICE, while executing a tactical retreat there, still lurks and terrifies. And elsewhere, the construction of the “detention camps,” which may as well be concentration camps, continues apace — along with a “massive” presidential bunker.
Please don’t misconstrue me. The mass protests, along with the millions of daily acts of kindness, reflect the best of us and are a reason to hope for our country.
But stopping our deranged president will take more than protests, even involving millions; and it will take more than letters to our officeholders, or even personal lobbying of such, unless you happen to have a corporate check for half a million or so for their PAC in your pocket. And even then.
It will take, at minimum, a free and fair election, and there is hardly a guarantee of that. And it will take practical rather than symbolic impact — and that translates to mass economic action.
That comes in essentially three forms: boycotts, strikes, and tax revolts. Of these, the withholding of tax payment is, at scale, the most directly impactful. But it is also the most difficult to organize at scale and make publicly visible and contagious.
Pay for This?
I am not so naive as to assume that anyone, let alone masses, will follow suit. Or that a critical mass of others, of their own accord, will act on their own rage and defiance in this particular manner — though I am always up for a pleasant surprise.
No, the driver of this decision is conscience, personal and solitary. I am well aware of the personal risk, the price likely to be paid. The question posed is whether I can, in good conscience, fund this regime and its unconscionable — and often illegal — actions, at home and abroad. Can I add my money to the stream that irrigates these poison fields?
How can I lend material support to:
- Threatening genocide (“A whole civilization will die tonight”), even if merely a negotiating tactic — in a social media post — after starting a war of choice, with no evidence of immediate threat and in the midst of promising negotiations, and with no exit plan?
- Blowing up fishing boats in the open sea, and murdering all those aboard — again, with no evidence of justification?
- Building concentration camps to hold detained “illegals,” but also conveniently available, when political push comes to shove, for American citizens who are dissidents and opponents of the regime?
- Constructing a massive underground presidential bunker reminiscent of the Fuhrerbunker below the Reichschancellery that Hitler retreated to in the final days of World War II?
- Lavishing $85 billion on ICE as a modern day presidential Gestapo?
- Gutting the EPA, the US Forest Service, FEMA, and other government services and agencies our tax dollars have long funded?
- Refusing to regulate the breakneck speed of artificial intelligence development (as Europe, China, and many US states are trying to do), and moving to prohibit the states from engaging in any such regulation?
- Attacking renewable energy sources, climate-change mitigation programs, public health, basic scientific research, higher education, the legal profession, the media, and the historical record itself?
- Vengefully prosecuting dedicated public servants by weaponizing the Department of Justice?
- Using the powers of his high office to fatten his own bank accounts; grift and graft and pay-to-play. “Deals” that take our tax money to make the rich, starting with the Trump family, richer and richer. Plus finding ever more slippery ways to evade paying their fair share of tax — having lobbied hard for the loopholes to make that possible — driven not by conviction, although Trump did once say he didn’t like what the government did with his money, but by greed and entitlement.
- The whole suite of behaviors that would not be one iota different were Vladimir Putin personally directing them.
Now the mob boss with nukes wants $1.7 TRILLION for his military — while claiming there’s not enough federal money for day care, Medicare, Medicaid, and other such luxuries that only the non-rich might need.
We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care. And they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it.
We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.
If you’re keeping score at home, the “Peace President” is proposing a massively militarized America — at $5,000 military spending per capita, we’d leave even North Korea deep in the dust — with the social safety net, including provisions for health and education, ripped to shreds.
Just exactly when in hell did Americans — blue, red, or purple — say okay to that!?
While it should come as no surprise that Cadet Bone Spurs would inevitably wind up overcompensating bigly for his callow salad days, the reality is that public support for this vision of his, worthy of Kim Jong-un, is nil.
But it’s hard to see how ordinary political processes can stop Trump from setting in motion more global upheaval such that his wishes come true and the country — which, under his new budget, would spend more on its military than the current military budgets of the next 28 highest-spending countries combined — would need even more “guarding.” Including from the so-called “enemy within.”
This is, to put it bluntly, insane.
It is one thing to oppose a policy or suite of policies one’s duly elected government is implementing. It is quite another to try opposing the kind of escalating derangement that Trump, having banished all adults from the room, has exhibited throughout his second term.
Even more difficult since the madness is sane-washed by an access-driven media, thoroughly condoned by a craven GOP, and tolerated by a public that has grown too accustomed to things just working out, one way or another. What we’re experiencing is a combination of virulent infection and breakdown of our political immune system.
All of this has been written about — oh, has it been written about! — fiercely, brilliantly, eloquently, and so very copiously. We keyboard warriors have shown Trump — to quote our self-designated “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth — no quarter.
Now I’m not saying words don’t matter. They do. And there’s even some risk in them — though, for all of Trump’s war on the media and those who speak against him, the First Amendment seems still to be standing, albeit wobbly.
But words are not enough to stop the madness. That will take something tougher, and riskier.
We Have Leverage, Real Leverage
This is the world’s richest nation, one that is all about money, with a president who is all about money. So what better weapon is there than the withholding of money — from the corporate sphere via boycotts and general strikes, and from the governmental sphere through tax revolt?
It has to start somewhere, and, frankly, I have become ashamed of urging others on from the safety of my laptop.
Some have already given their lives. Renee Good and Alex Pretti come immediately to mind, but there have been others, less honored. Inevitably, every tyranny takes its toll.
So, let’s roll.
Here’s my plan. I will pay my state taxes as always. I will take the money I would ordinarily send to the US Treasury next week and deposit it into a separate bank account held in escrow until January 21, 2029, or until such time someone other than Donald J. Trump occupies the White House — assuming that that someone is sane enough to signal the end of Trump’s mad and evil rampage.
Sooner or later — sooner if the woefully understaffed Internal Revenue Service has fired up its AI, later if it has not — when I receive an IRS letter querying the whereabouts of my Tax Year 2025 payment, I will let them know its whereabouts, my intentions, and my reasons. And we’ll take it from there.
I know that Trump and his regime can play rough, but I don’t plan to lose any sleep over this. If the IRS takes three years to “come after me,” I will gladly pay what I owe, with interest and any penalties, to the treasury of whatever president we elect in 2028 (assuming it is not anyone named Trump).
If, as is more likely, I hear from the IRS during Trump’s current term, I will do all I can to drag out adverse proceedings to January 2029. If and when penalties are levied, such that my ultimate payment — to the next administration — is significantly greater than my current obligation, so be it, with my compliments.
But in no event will I willingly contribute materially to a regime actively engaged in the corrosion and destruction of our country.
As I stated, I take this action as a matter of conscience — I cannot, in good conscience, do otherwise.
As a political weapon, of course, at such small scale, it has no practical value.
I do not, however, believe that I am wrong in imagining there are millions of American taxpayers as done as I am with this nightmare, but who — out of tradition or habit, or stopped cold by fear — have not yet consulted their consciences and considered the full range of options open to them.
I am writing about my own decision in the hope to inspire such consideration, and the action I hope springs from it.
I am aware of a strain of thought that Trump is so far gone that he will bring about his own demise, or at least be self-limiting. He will continue digging his hole deeper, goes this thinking, so just stay out of the way and let him keep digging until he disappears.
There may be something in that — and, then again, there may not. As I’ve written previously, Trump has entered what I call the dictator’s doom loop — a vicious cycle of escalating resistance and repression — and has effectively abandoned popularity in favor of power.
And he retains vast powers of command — over a growing proto-SS in ICE, over a purge-in-process military, and over a massive nuclear arsenal, still literally at his fingertips with no one authorized to stop him. We certainly cannot count on his going gentle, nor on the adults who have left the room.
The Die Has Been Cast
Trump’s nonnegotiable imperative is to hold power and avoid accountability at all costs. He has shown every sign that he will make a multipronged play to subvert the midterms.
And, consider carefully, then what? What form would our resistance take when that battle is joined? Will the courts be enough? Will the rule of law hold against desperation tactics and deadly force?
These are threats that must be taken seriously. The things I’ve warned about previously — threats that may have seemed alarmist at the time — have come to pass. We Cassandras and catastrophists, it turns out, had it right. A bad dream became a worse reality.
No one wants this battle. But we’re not given much of a choice. The only real choice we have is how we fight it — what tactics, what weapons we are willing to employ.
Embraced at scale, with the safety of numbers, the withholding of federal tax payment is the most potent weapon in our control, laser-focused on a regime that has moved beyond incompetent, wrong-headed, and unpopular to deadly dangerous and criminal.
It is a tactic that is, most critically, nonviolent; and thus does not provide a target for the regime’s use of deadly force.
If employed en masse it would force a reckoning — within the Cabinet and/or the halls of Congress — leading, one way or another, to the removal of a president who, if he remains in power, is on a course to do untold damage to our country and the world.
As Merry reminds Frodo near the end of The Lord of the Rings, “You won’t rescue … the Shire just by being shocked and sad.”
Neither will we.
- Jonathan D. SimonJonathan D. Simon, JD, is a senior editor at WhoWhatWhy; a long-time proponent of public, observable vote counting; and author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy.
