“He would love nothing more than to divide our country based on race, religion,... .................. It didn’t start with Trump, we were on the path before he was elected.
George Orwell was quoted with some descriptions but in the closing of the article is this very particular description of how the word lost all meaning as it was turned into a shapeless insult. Replace “fascism” with “racism”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism
George Orwell wrote in 1944:
...the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else ... Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathisers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.[54]
and if you’ve been following the charge, in 2008 Bill and Hillary Clinton were called Racists by the Left. This year, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden were called Racists.