The major theme that emerged from last night's Democratic convention was that Joe Biden is a decent man while Donald Trump is corrupt, incompetent and mentally ill.

Which raises three questions : How did we end up with a corrupt, incompetent and mentally ill president; how did he get enough power to be able to twist the levers of government toward his own reelection; and why do Republicans in the US Senate continue to support him?

The answers track back to two highly corrupt supreme court decisions in the 1970s that set up the Reagan revolution, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's response to 9/11.

In 1976 and 1978, the US Supreme Court declared, for the first time in our nation's history, that if billionaires or corporations wanted to buy politicians, or even in the entire political party, that was no longer considered bribery or corruption. Instead, it was the exercise of "free speech."

As a result, huge amounts of money flooded into the GOP in the 1980 election, putting Ronald Reagan over the top. Lobbyists had radically expanded power because could use their money in unlimited amounts and radical new ways, and they set out on a 40 year campaign to bring us what, today, we know as the Trump administration.

Their money is also a large part of why Republican senators are still dancing to the tune of libertarian and billionaires and corporations in heavily polluting industries.

More recently, after 9/11 Congress created a new police super agency, named with the word that Adolf Hitler began using to describe Germany in 1937, "The Homeland," and massive new police powers were consolidated in the office of the presidency.

We saw Trump use these powers in Lafayette Park and Portland, as well as on our southern border, and he is now using those powers to track down and selectively prosecute individuals protesting in favor of democracy and against fascism. Donald Trump is often sabotaged by his own incompetence and mental illness. He blurts out his schemes before he has realized them, diminishing their effectiveness, as we saw with his admitting to what he was doing to the Post Office.

The next Republican president who wants to be a fascist dictator will probably not be as impaired or incompetent as Trump, and we need to get ready for that.

To save our republic, we need an immediate national discussion about how to break up, or at least constitutionally constrain, the Department of Homeland Security and get money out of politics at all levels.

-Thom