What did Donald Trump do today?

He called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One tonight, Trump said that ethnic Palestinians living in or recently displaced from the Israeli-occupied Gaza territory should be removed to Egypt or Jordan.

The term for the systematic and forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area is "ethnic cleansing." It is a crime against humanity under international law that the United States played a leading role in establishing.

Precisely what constitutes ethnic cleansing can be a matter of debate, especially because it is often only a prelude to the even more horrific crime of genocide. Examples of ethnic cleansing from modern history include, but are not limited to:

• the repeated forced resettlement of Native Americans into reservations
• the expulsion of Greeks and Armenians from Turkey during and after World War One (as part of larger genocidal campaigns)
• a series of twentieth-century campaigns by China against ethnic Tibetans
• German state harassment of Jews and Romani leading to mass immigration prior to the start of the Holocaust
• the expulsion of Muslims from post-partition India
• the campaign by the Khmer Rouge against non-Cambodian ethnic minorities between the 1960s and 1980s
• the exodus under threat of Iraqi Christians in the 21st century
• the forced migration of 900,000-1.6 million Ukrainians into Russia from Russian-occupied provinces in eastern Ukraine
  
  

Full audio of Trump's remarks is available here. His call for ethnic cleansing starts at about the 11-minute mark.

Why does this matter?

• Even by Trump's standards, this is abhorrent.