Merry Christmas, troops? Not so much!

Remember when the billionaire candidate kept saying that, if he were elected president, we'd all be saying Merry Christmas again? He is now, God help us all, the president. But it's not likely to be a very merry Christmas for the troops he's sending to the United States-Mexico border.

It's beyond debate that shameless midterm fearmongering is the reason Cadet Bone Spurs—who never entered the military and never got deployed anywhere—is deploying something like 15,000 troops. A leaked Pentagon document makes clear that the military thinks there's virtually no threat from the caravan that has  Bone Spurs  quaking in his boots. The slow pace of this fearsome caravan almost guarantees that those troops will be at the border, doing nothing much, through the holidays.

It's possible to argue that they are better off languishing safely in the warmth of America's Southwest, facing no real threat, than being in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the forever war drags on endlessly, producing no real result but death and injury. But many of those young men and women were not getting ready for immediate deployment to a combat zone. They have been stationed on posts in the United States, living with their families. Now they must leave those families behind—no Thanksgiving, no Hanukkah, no Kwanzaa, no Christmas, no New Year's Eve—for a mission that is entirely bogus.

"Support the troops" is one of the facile, ubiquitous, but meaningless mantras of our times. But sending them off to protect the nation from this threat, which their own  generals feel is negligible, is hardly supporting the troops. Let's hope they remember this heartless  behavior by the commander-in-chief if he's still in office and seeking re-election in 2020. They should keep in mind this holiday season, separated from their families, when they vote in 2020.