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So declares President Donald Trump, musing recently over which Democratic-run city is in his sights next for deployment of National Guard troops, ostensibly to fight crime.

We say “ostensibly” because that’s not what the National Guard troops he has sent into Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and, now, , are actually engaged in — and there’s precious little evidence that crimefighting was ever the point. National Guard troops aren’t trained for civilian law enforcement because, constitutionally speaking, that’s not what they’re supposed to be doing. The ones deployed so far are primarily standing around guarding federal facilities from nothing in particular in lower-crime areas of those cities.

Think of them as authoritarian window-dressing. Trump likes the specter of camouflage-clad, assault-rifle-wielding troops conspicuously stationed among American civilians for the same reason he revels in such Soviet-style trappings as a big military parade on his birthday and hanging from government buildings: It’s who he is — and it’s what he wants America to be.

ӣ����Ƶ’ crime problem is real, but Trump’s tinpot-dictator routine isn’t the solution. Let him stick to more important stuff, like purging of treasonous one-liners.

On the miniscule chance Trump is actually interested in “saving” ӣ����Ƶ, here are some suggestions on how he might actually help:

• Quit arming our criminals. Trump and his party have made reasonable firearms restrictions virtually impossible nationwide and especially in Missouri. It’s no coincidence that our state has both some of America’s loosest gun laws and some of its highest homicide rates.

Legislative Republicans here love to point out that ӣ����Ƶ is an epicenter of the state’s homicides — while conveniently ignoring their own role in that crisis, hobbling local law enforcement by quashing even such mild law-and-order restrictions as permit requirements, universal background checks and red-flag laws.

As we saw with the recent redistricting outrage here, Trump can pick up the phone and basically order Missouri’s lickspittle leaders to do anything he wants and they will cravenly obey. Talking some sense into them on guns would be far more useful than having armed National Guard troops intimidating tourists at the Gateway Arch.

• Quit threatening us with epidemics. Trump could start by firing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccination conspiracist who lied to Congress to win confirmation and now is methodically tearing down generations’ worth of miraculous advances against infectious disease. Missouri already is facing its highest rates of measles infections in years thanks to a deeply misguided anti-vax movement that RFK is legitimizing from within the administration.

• Quit gutting our medical research. ӣ����Ƶ is a medical research hub, with world-class institutions pioneering life-saving breakthroughs. But Washington University alone stands to lose more than $100 million in federal funding if the administration’s short-sighted, know-nothing cuts to medical research survive pending legal challenges.

• Quit hurting our poor and our hospitals. Trump’s Medicaid cuts — inhumane to start with and more so when you consider their main purpose was to fund tax cuts for billionaires — are expected to lead to millions of dollars in funding losses to hospitals all over Missouri and throw some 180,000 low-income Missourians off their health coverage. Most of those thrown off their coverage will be people who are employed but cannot navigate the paperwork labyrinth created by the new proof-of-work requirements that study after study shows are unnecessary and unworkable.

• Quit undermining our democracy. In the aforementioned redistricting, the Missouri Legislature recently engaged in unprecedented mid-decade re-gerrymandering on orders from the president, with the plainly stated goal of turning Democrats’ current 6-2 minority congressional representation (which already underrepresents actual Democratic voters in Missouri) to a 7-1 minority.

With this putrid stunt, Trump has literally disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of registered Democrats in the Kansas City area — citizens who, like it or not, have the same right to fair congressional representation as anyone else.

And now he’s going to “save” ӣ����Ƶ — from ourselves — by deploying armed federalized troops on our streets? Pardon us if we’re skeptical.