The Final Hour and Why We Should Care


I freely admit that from the moment Kamala Harris entered the election, I wanted to do whatever I could to urge people to vote: to elect her President, to defeat Donald Trump and the GOP plans for the country, to defeat Project2025’s plans for the country, and to save democracy as we have known it all our lives. So during the past months I’ve written postcards in support of Sherrod Brown of Ohio, I’ve written letters to voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio through Vote Forward, I’ve given money to campaigns, and I’ve written these essays. I’ve sent texts, and I’ve posted on social media.

And now, here we are, teetering on the precipice with nearly everything hanging in the balance, particularly those things that made this country a haven for people like my grandparents seeking a better life.

Americans have long had a fascination with celebrity. When celebrities run for political office, it often seems as if the only qualification necessary to gain votes is their fame. California—where I grew up—is especially vulnerable to the celebrity-as-qualified-governmental-official syndrome. This gave us song-and-dance man George Murphy as Senator, Shirley Temple as member of Congress, Clint Eastwood as mayor of Carmel, Sono Bono as mayor of Palm Springs and member of Congress, Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, and Ronald Reagan, first as governor for two terms and then as President.

Of course, a celebrity has as much right to run for office as does anyone else. The tough bit, though, comes down to discernment. How does the voting public discern between the celebrity who plays a role on stage, screen, or television and the real person who exists beneath the fame? I recall talking to a woman of my acquaintance when Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor. She’d seen him that day in person and was flashing around a photo of him, so I asked her if she was planning to vote for him. Her reply was, “Of course! He’s so hot!”

It seems to me that someone’s hotness or lack thereof shouldn’t be one of that person’s qualifying attributes for public office. Nor should someone’s celebrity. I think that, instead, it’s a good idea to look at the character, intelligence, and experience of the person first and only afterwards consider what that individual may have to offer in the area of heat.

At this point the voters have access to mounds of information that have been offered for both of the main candidates for President and the platforms of their parties. The voters have had countless opportunities to read about the candidates, listen to them speak, evaluate the answers they have given to questions, weigh their plans for the country on issues as diverse as women’s health and solar energy. I would hazard that a very small fraction of the voting public is undecided at this point.

Nonetheless, as a closing note, I would like to point out some concerns we all might want to think about in these last days.

A group called Duty to Warn has been following Donald Trump’s words and actions since he announced he was running for President in 2015. This group comprises both physicians and mental health professionals, and they have noted the alterations in Mr. Trump and the manner in which these alterations have developed and accelerated in the last nine years. In particular, the mental health professionals have voiced their concerns over signs of Mr. Trump’s growing dementia. (Believe me, I know how difficult that word dementia is for Mr. Trump’s supporters to see, not to mention to think about.) Duty to Warn points out several signs indicative of mental decline. These signs appear not when he has been given questions in advance or when he is being interviewed by someone who doesn’t point out prevarications or claims with no veracity. These signs appear when he is in a stressful situation or one in which he has not been scripted. The signs are:

Inability to focus on a single topic while speaking

Confusing people (Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi; his White House physician Ronny Jackson for GOP Senator Ron Johnson; President Obama for President Biden and vice versa)

Failure to complete sentences coherently

Losing train of thought when attempting to answer a question or make a statement

Displaying irrationality and irritability

Phonemic paraphasia (swapping parts of words for others that sound similar [an example would be ‘fewsher’ for ‘future’ ‘Venezuero’ for ‘Venezuela’ ‘stake mountain’ for ‘snake mountain’])

Duty to Warn also expresses concerns about Mr. Trump’s gait (during which he sometimes drags one of his legs as he did most recently when attempting to climb into a garbage truck) and his loss of motor skills (such as requiring two hands to lift a bottle of water), both of which are indicators of dementia.

I realize that to those who love and admire Donald Trump, the fact that he might be encountering a grave health problem is difficult to look at and/or to accept. But Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his medical records suggests that there is something contained therein that his staff does not want his supporters to know. Among those supporters are the billionaires who have been pouring money into PACs that support Trump’s campaign.

Despite all evidence that he is not a well man, the billionaires have not backed away from him. It would be naïve to believe that these billionaires want nothing in return. They did not get to their position of being billionaires from a fervent sense of patriotism. Instead, they know that, ever since the US Supreme Court declared that corporations are people and can thus donate to political campaigns as much as they like, their support of Trump and Vance will not go unrewarded.

I suggest that their rewards will take many different forms, depending upon the corporations they represent. I suggest their rewards will come in the form of easing of environmental protections, reluctance to file anti-trust suits against mega corporations like Amazon, refusal to support minimum wage increases or fairness in overtime pay, refusal to support union actions, turning of blind eyes to discrimination in the work place, lack of interest in addressing the vast differences in how people are taxed, acceptance of the invasion and polluting of federal lands in the pursuit of profits. Indeed, I suggest that the billionaires who are supporting Mr. Trump know exactly what they want. They also know exactly how to get it. It matters not to them that Mr. Trump may well die in office or be found unable to serve due to mental decline. For J. D. Vance waits in the wings and as a legal scholar he has enough Latin to know the meaning of quid pro quo.

We the voters, however, can wrest the power away from the billionaires who are seeking control at the highest level of government. We the voters can finally say that, after nine years of Donald Trump—enough is enough. Donald Trump told voters in 2015 and 2016 that “I alone can fix [the country]”. All we have to do is reflect upon his four years in office to evaluate how well he did.

Perhaps one person “alone” can fix the country. I hope we have reached the point of seeing that that one person is neither Donald Trump nor J.D. Vance. And it certainly isn’t one of the billionaires waiting in the wings for payday.

Elizabeth George
Seattle, Washington
October 31, 2024