If money is speech, my taxes' supporting Trump violates my First Amendment rights

Let me say at the outset that the argument here is a full-throated objection to the oligarchic notion that money is speech, not an advocacy of designating how one's taxes may be used.(1) If money was speech, then the slave-holding landholders of Socrates' time would have had more "speech" than the nearly penniless philosopher.

If taxes to the "president" is supportive "speech," then that violates the First Amendment principle that communicative freedom includes not only the right to think and speak freely, but to refuse to utter anything abhorrent to one's thought and principles.

Another point is that we are in the position of a hypothetical young German liberal, Hildetrude Weineck, born in Jena in 1910. Hildetrude was as opposed to Nazism as any of us, and voted against Hitler (just as we voted against Trump last year) when he was elected Chancellor on January 30, 1933. She was 23.

Hildetrude was powerless to stop Hitler's barbarous policies—Kristallnacht, the Gleichschaltung, the Endlösung, and the suicidal initiation of a war against both the Soviet Union and the United States—just as we are unable, at least at present, to stop the cruel and unspeakable barbarities of the witless liar now usurping the Oval Office. But she suffered right along with the guilty.

We liberals who support the Enlightenment ideals of the Founding find ourselves in what Andrew Sullivan calls the "Caligula phase of the collapse of the American republic." Sullivan recounts a conversation with a retiree on a recent flight.

At one point, I gingerly indicated that I didn’t exactly share the views of his neighbors. “Oh I understand,” he said. “My wife is always telling me never to talk about religion or politics with strangers, but I can’t help myself.” No problem, I told him. I do it all the time too. Then he leaned in, pushed his wire eyeglasses up his nose, and looked straight into my eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “This president will be the greatest president we have ever had in our entire history.”

We are involuntarily complicit. Our "speech" supports a bigot who slanders fellow North Americans by saying, "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." We're subject to the indignity of having our representative before the world degrade and demean an international religious leader who criticized him: “For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful.” We are all too aware that the rest of the world is witnessing the cruelty of an alt-right government doing its very best to condemn millions of its citizens to lives of illness, disability, incapacity, and agonizing premature death by stealing their health care funds in order to aggrandize the obscenely rich.

As Sullivan added, "I have a hard time figuring out how this ends, even though it must end."

But please do not forget, This is not all we are. When the immigration executive order placed "the leader of the free world" in the third world position of refusing to honor its own visas, and the "president" mocked the leader who wept at the utterly pointless suffering of families and children, at airports all over the country hundreds of lawyers came and volunteered their assistance.

This is a crisis of the Republic. The more the laws and the norms and the guardrails fail, the more it is up to us. We are the people.


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(1)  While it would be nice if each taxpayer could slice and dice their taxes so as to pay only for public enterprises they approve, it's unworkable. The objection of pacifists to funding the army, and of people who are not into sports to public funding of stadiums, does not make sequestering taxes for actions one does not support practicable.