There is his declaration that he will rewrite the Constitution by executive order, revoking birthright citizenship, which no one with any serious understanding of the law believes is within his power.

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He has also done something he can do: ordering 5,200 troops to the border, to deal with the supposed national emergency posed by a caravan of destitute migrants. (By Wednesday afternoon, he had upped the ante to a possible 15,000 troops.) Those asylum seekers are hundreds of miles away and will not arrive for weeks, if they get there at all, given that their numbers are reported to have shrunken by half.

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On Wednesday morning, the president trumpeted that plan again:

It is not the first time Trump has tried a version of this particular stunt.

When Trump sent National Guard troops to the border last spring, something both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had done under similar circumstances, members of the finest military in the world ended up doing things like feeding the Border Patrol’s horses, shoveling manure from their stalls and fixing flat tires.

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This time, he is taking the unprecedented step of deploying active-duty personnel, in roughly the same numbers as we have serving in Iraq, along with military helicopters and giant spools of razor wire. Trump claims they will be “waiting for” the migrants at the border, implying that U.S. military will be apprehending them as they arrive. But the troops will actually be there in a support role for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, given that the 19th-century Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits the U.S. military from direct participation in law enforcement. In other words, they will be limited to doing what the Guard was already doing.

The bottom line is this: Trump is using American troops as props, a gesture both wasteful and disrespectful.