Trump Pitches Ethnic Cleansing; Media Nod, Take Notes

None of the White House press corps followup questions rhymed with "imes against humanity"

Jan. 27: Trump’s ethnic-cleansing pitch shot down instantly … Netanyahu free to attend Auschwitz service despite warrant for his arrest … Trump ends efforts to mitigate racist polluters … Tuskegee Airmen defeat Nazis again …

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Pres. Donald Trump during a Jan. 25, 2025, press gaggle says he’d like to “clean out” Gaza as journalists politely seek specifics rather than a legal justification or explanation of how he’ll plead in court. (Screengrab / TFN screenshot of Meidas Touch video of Forbes video utilizing someone’s uncredited still photo.)

Pres. Donald Trump this weekend said he’d like to “clean out” Gaza, proposing to relocate the 1.5 million residents to somewhere else.

Which would be a crime.

Not a misdemeanor kind of crime, as crime buffs may know. Not even the felony kind. No, we’re talking the against-humanity kind.

Trump was telling reporters about his Saturday conversation with Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein, better known by his nom du monarchy as Jordan’s King Abdullah II: This Time It’s Personal.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s remarks to reporters were caught on video, and I haven’t seen the complete audio but I’ve stitched at least a partial transcript together from audio posted by Meidas Touch and USA Today, which apparently still exists. We join the conversation about Abdullah already in progress (emphasis added for prosecutors):

Trump: I said to him, I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.

Q: You’d like Jordan to house people from Gaza?

Trump: I’d like him to take people. I’d like Egypt to take people. I’m meeting with, I’m talking to General [Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi tomorrow, some time, I believe, and I’d like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people. I can—I mean, you’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing. It’s, you know, it’s, over the centuries, that’s had many, many conflicts, that site. And, I don’t know, it’s, something has to happen, but, it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished. And people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change.

Q: Temporarily? Or would they—

Trump: It could be either. It could be temporarily, could be long term.

Trump, we assume, then vowed to identify, hunt down, and punish whoever was responsible for almost-demolishing Gaza.

And here’s a fun bit of trivia for you etymology nerds about that people-taking Trump wants Jordan and Egypt to do: When the people being taked don’t want to be taked, there’s another word for people-taking that derives from the roots for “kid” and “napping.”

In fact, the International Criminal Court’s statutory definition of crimes against humanity includes “Deportation or forcible transfer of population.” Y’know what’s pretty forcible? Bombs!

So while Pres. Joe Biden merely supplied the means for a crime against humanity (in violation of U.S. law), Trump is now confessing to trying to make the deportation part happen. And he’s giving Israel more bombs for the forcible-transfer part.

Trump just told the Pentagon — which, sidebar!, is now run by an anti-Muslim crusader — to end Biden’s freeze on supplying Israel with 2,000-pound MK-84 bombs.

Axios reported on Saturday that 1,800 MK-84 bombs would be loaded on a ship for Israel within days. Y’know, for the cease-fire!

And as for whether Trump is envisioning merely “temporary” crimes against humanity, The Guardian has some history I hadn’t heard before and that’ll be hard to forget. When hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes in the 1940s when the Israeli nation was created, many of those displaced persons, too, believed it to be temporary — and held onto their house keys for decades.

And, PS, displaced Gazans are already on the move: Going back home.

The Trump White House readout for the Saturday call with Jordan’s king understandably didn’t mention the whole awkward ethnic cleansing thing. In fact, both nations’ readouts were unethnically cleansed of references to ethnic cleansing. And so were U.S. headlines, some of which made “clean out” sound like an upbeat Febreze commercial.

• New York Times: “Trump Pushes Jordan and Egypt to Take in Palestinians to ‘Clean Out’ Gaza”

• The Washington Post: “Trump says to ‘clean out’ Gaza, urges Arab countries to take more refugees”

• AP: “Trump’s Palestinian refugee idea falls flat with Arab allies and confounds a Republican senator”

Weirdly, most headlines focused on Trump’s obviously bold, muscular plan instead of the fact that it was an instant fail, brutally shot down by ostensible allies such as Egypt, Jordan, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). (Kudos to the AP headline.)

Also weirdly, independent and non-U.S. media headlines managed to get this right.

• The Guardian: “Trump’s Gaza proposal rejected by allies and condemned as ethnic cleansing plan”

• BBC: “Trump’s call for Palestinians to leave Gaza condemned as ethnic cleansing”

• Al Jazeera: “Ethnic cleansing feared as Trump asks Jordan, Egypt to take Gaza residents”

• The Fucking News: “Trump Pitches Ethnic Cleansing; Media Nod, Take Notes”

In fact, U.S. media have been so blasé about ethnic cleansing, I hadn’t even seen reports about Trump’s earlier suggestion to clean out Gaza. I had caught him lusting after Gaza’s beachfront properties, which did make the news here, but I only saw last week’s earlier suggestion of cleaning out residents when a search popped up this article. From the Israeli paper Haaretz.

Anyway, the important thing is that some American voters didn’t sully themselves by voting for Biden.

ROAD TRIP! Poland chose an unusual way to mark tomorrow’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the notorious death camp that was part of Nazi Germany’s genocidal campaign against Jews and other groups.

The country announced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is free to attend and won’t be arrested on the outstanding warrants against him for — well, this is awkward — war crimes.

Netanyahu is a wanted man on charges filed by the ICC, to which Poland is a signatory. It wasn’t yet clear whether Netanyahu plans to attend the solemn commemoration of past war crimes, or stay home and make new ones.

Trump Would Rather Cleanse People Than Air

Pres. Donald Trump is shutting down a quarter-century of efforts to mitigate the disproportionate impact of pollution on Black and Latino people.

It’s an efficient, synergistic combination of his anti-environmental policies and his straight-up racism. And it’ll cause more deaths among Black and Latino people.

Trump is shutting down offices and killing policies that helped those predominantly non-white communities disproportionately polluted on by predominantly white-owned corporations.

In 2021, 36 white kids died of asthma. So did 27 Hispanic kids. And 78 Black kids.

According to the federal Office of Minority Health — which your well-meaning TFN probably just doomed by mentioning — when you factor in the disparate overall population sizes, the asthma mortality rate for Black kids is almost eight times the rate for white kids.

Pres. Joe Biden had made more progress toward environmental justice than just about anyone could have while also subsidizing fossil fuels. But he was old and Vice Pres. Kamala Harris didn’t have enough vibes, so Trump it is. As the AP reports, Trump repaid those Latino voters and Black men who shifted his way thusly:

“…Trump in his first week eliminated a team of White House advisors whose job it was to ensure the entire federal government helped communities located near heavy industry, ports and roadways. Trump eliminated the ‘Justice40’ initiative the Biden administrat[i]on had created. It required 40% of the benefits from certain environmental programs go to hard-hit communities.”

Of course, this is because Trump doesn’t see race. His administration argues that past discrimination doesn’t justify new “discrimination.” Y’know, the way firefighters spray water on all houses equally, regardless of which ones might have been set on fire in the distant past when the alarm was pulled. Ancient history, yo.

Trump Adapts “Invisible Man” as Non-Film

A U.S. official confirmed on Saturday that the U.S. Air Force had pulled from its training courses videos teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Both were historic and groundbreaking military programs during World War II.

WASP involved training civilian women pilots. The Tuskegee Airmen were the legendary, segregated units including 450 Black pilots who flew combat missions during the war and whose successes led Pres. Harry Truman to desegregate the military.

But both fell victim to Pres. Donald Trump’s war on diversity.

The Air Force pulled the videos along with other material for a curriculum review at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, where basic training is done.

Last night, however, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth notched his very first retreat. Despite all his noise about how diversity distracts from war-fighting, Hegseth yesterday reversed course and said the videos will be reinstated.

In the process, Hegseth and Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) teamed up to pretend that the videos were removed by someone who wanted to make anti-diversity racism and sexism somehow look bad. As if Republicans haven’t spent years deriding education about Black history and erasing it from schools just the way Ralph Ellison’s classic “Invisible Man” taught them to.

Britt posted online about “malicious compliance¹ we’ve seen in recent days.” Meaning, the yoinking of WASP and the Tuskegee Airmen.

Hegseth responded with such efficiency that he didn’t even allocate a comma: “We’re all over it Senator. This will not stand.”

In other words, yet another Trump failure as the political physics of their crusades kick in. And just cuz they’re pretending it’s not a defeat doesn’t mean Newsfuckers have to.

The Many Failures of Week One

To mark the first week of the Trump2.0 presidency, TFN this weekend presented a flurry — a slurry? — of Pres. Donald Trump’s accomplishments thing-doing, shorn of the media awe at his campy performative masculinity.

The point was to show how so many of the things he’s done/undone instantly blew up in his face — apparently permanently coating it with a strangely-hued patina unlike any known flesh tone — and/or planted the seeds for future up-face-blowings. To wit: the Tuskegee Airmen’s latest aerial victory.

Which leads me to another alleged Trump victory:

Trump Defeats Colombia in Hours-Long Trade War

After Colombia rejected military flights of deportees from the U.S., Pres. Donald Trump yesterday threatened 25% tariffs on every Colombian import, to rise to 50% in a week. Which would show Colombia!

I unpacked all of this stuff in a TFN bonus story² last night to explain how it’d make it more expensive now for us to unpack anything from Colombia. Primarily coffee.

Colombian Pres. Gustavo Petro responded with a frankly incredible, peripatetic, almost poetic diatribe³ in which he appeared to threaten tariffs on U.S. products.

(Jesus Maynard Christ, does the Global Manual of Presidenting say nothing about how tariffs work?!?)

Anyway, it looks like Colombia blinked, and is now allowing U.S. military flights to resume. What’s unclear to me, so far, is whether the U.S. made any concessions about how deportees are treated — that was Petro’s real beef, after seeing them handcuffed on the flights. We’ll see!

Some Venting

I just got an email from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). The chair, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) informed me that the DSCC wanted to know my priorities. Awww!

So, she provided a link for the DSCC “Focus Group.” Which issues do I think Democrats should prioritize? Which GOP actions concern me? Should the DSCC focus on protecting incumbents or expanding the battlefield?

Now, I’m not naive. I saw this coming. But it was still heart-breaking to reach the point where the DSCC confirmed that I could not submit my responses without giving them money. That’s bad enough, but I want to make a couple other points other than the systemic exclusion of poor voices by the party that wonders why it’s losing.

The multiple-choice issues I could choose for Democrats to focus on didn’t include championing secularism. The list of concerning GOP actions didn’t include GOP theocratizing. And the campaign options conspicuously didn’t mention anything about democratizing primaries so that instead of mindlessly protecting incumbents, we’re opening primaries and pursuing better outcomes and representatives — incumbent or otherwise.

I’ll also add that Gillibrand, as I’ve reported, has been an active participant in the soft end of the theocratizing spear, assisting the Fellowship Foundation in its attempts to blur/erase the lines between church and state. The Freedom From Religion Foundation would like her to stop.

If any Newsfuckers would like to help the DSCC focus-group any of this, you can share your thoughts — politely! but for free! — through a variety of contact methods on the DSCC contact page. Tell ‘em TFN says hi!

Three Quickies

• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is still around, apparently, and he’s trying to do to Florida Republican legislators what his DeSantisbane hero Pres. Donald Trump is doing to congressional Republicans: Dominate them and make them whimper like submissives through their ball gags. He forced them into a special session today to pass new laws he wants, but because he’s not Trump, they’re laughing at him, reminding him that they get to decide which laws to pass when. Only Trump can trump the GOP, yo. Without him, they fall apart. Even with him.

• Trump will also be in Florida today — which is weird because I was told government workers have to work in their workplaces. The occasion is a GOP summit where congressional Republicans — desperate to pass their America-fucking agenda early enough that voters can be hypnotized before the 2026 elections — will beg Trump to decide whether to do so in one bill or two. Tough choice! One problem: He doesn’t wanna decide. So nyah.

• As with so many things Trump, the Gulf of America was not his idea. It started as a joke on The Colbert Report (RIP).

TCB

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1. Britt presented absolutely zero evidence that this was malicious compliance rather than good-faith racism and sexism and didn’t even bother to pretend she had any way of knowing one way or the other. Cuz people just say shit.

2. You can choose to get or not get bonus stories, or the podcast, by adjusting your account settings here.

3. It reminded me of the lyrics to Guantamera, which I first learned in English from hearing Pete Seeger translate them on some live recording somewhere.