Donald Trump turns America back to its shameful past (Opinion) - CNN.com

(CNN)The rhetoric of the 2016 election has turned into an overflowing toxic brew of anger and rudeness that is staining the fabric of America, and there's a simple word that best describes it.

An eponymous term derived from the name of a billionaire businessman, it's a five-letter verb that has evolved from its dictionary definition into a word with an entirely new meaning:

Trump (verb): To ridicule or demean another person as a way of expressing one's superiority; to express the opinion that I'm better than you, I'm smarter than you, I'm richer than you and I'M MORE AMERICAN THAN YOU.

To trump is to bring out the worst in us. It enables us to demean Latinos and women, to mock people with physical disabilities, to advocate discriminating against immigrants on the basis of their religion, and to bully and belittle those who don't agree with us by labeling their decency "political correctness."

Palin: Are you ready to make America great again?
Palin: Are you ready to make America great again?
There was a time not too long ago when rage and rhetoric of this sort were commonplace: a time when people had to sit in the back of the bus because of their race; a time when they were forced to accept that they would always be second-class citizens because of their gender, their national origin or their sexual orientation.

I remember those times. My parents came to our country in the mid-1950s as some of the earliest Indian immigrants to America. Because of their national origin and their dark skin, they were thrown off of buses and denied service in restaurants. On one particularly awful day, they were arrested for playing tennis on a public tennis court.


It took the vision and leadership of many great souls, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose life we celebrated Monday, to overcome those awful times."