“I am thrilled to report that the U.S. Space Command headquarters will move to the beautiful locale of a place called Huntsville, Alabama — forever to be known from this point forward as Rocket City,” President Donald Trump announced yesterday in the Oval Office. Huntsville was already known as Rocket City because it’s home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, and that’s precisely why Trump’s move is welcome.
“This decision will help America defend and dominate the high frontier, as they call it,” Trump said. “We initially selected Huntsville for the SPACECOM headquarters, yet those plans were wrongfully obstructed by the Biden administration, and as you know, they moved them to a different locale, and today, we’re moving forward with what we want to do.” That different locale was Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the Space Force has been headquartered since Trump created it in 2018.
The U.S. Air Force has a strong presence in Colorado Springs, including the Air Force Academy. Initially, it made sense to start the Space Force there. But Trump is right — his administration and the Pentagon selected Huntsville in 2020, but Joe Biden did nothing to carry out the move despite repeated recommendations from Air Force leadership, and he (or his autopen) nixed the plan entirely in 2023.
According to the Associated Press in 2023, Biden believed “that keeping the command in Colorado Springs would avoid a disruption in readiness that the move would cause.” He didn’t seem to mind the disruption his vaccine mandate caused in the military. But that’s another story.
Biden also cited China’s advances as a reason to avoid “disruption,” but Huntsville will be a key part of Trump’s “Golden Dome” defense strategy. As Mark Alexander wrote in May at Trump’s announcement for the Golden Dome, “The most perilous ICBM threat to CONUS is from Red China, the ChiComs. The Defense Intelligence Agency just released an assessment that China has about 400 ICBMs, while Russia has about 350 and dictator Kim Jong-un’s North Korea has fewer than 10, but he is a Chinese surrogate.”
In other words, Biden was wrong. Who knew? He probably didn’t.
Speaking of Biden, who was elected thanks to the pandemic-tainted bulk-mail ballot strategy of the Democrats, Trump revisited that topic too. “The problem I have with Colorado — one of the big problems — they do mail-in voting,” he said. “They went to all mail-in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections, and we can’t have that. When a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections.”
The Denver Post editorial board went into conniptions, claiming that Trump “gave two reasons” for moving Space Command, “neither of which was true.” The editors rebutted his claim about his winning percentage in Alabama before noting that his objection to Colorado is part of “a gross lie” about his defeat in 2020. “There is simply no evidence that Colorado’s mail-in elections allow widespread fraud,” they argue.
Lack of evidence is not the same as positive evidence that Colorado’s elections are secure. Mail-in ballots are indeed inherently suspect without rigorous measures to ensure their credibility. Colorado may be exemplary in its handling of those ballots, but the system is ripe for fraud — especially when Colorado automatically sends ballots to every voter.
As for the HQ move, it’s not just some editors at Denver’s newspaper who object. Understandably, Colorado’s entire congressional delegation and both senators, regardless of party, say they are “united in fighting to reverse this decision” because it “weakens our national security at the worst possible time.” There are indeed reasons for the Space Force to be headquartered in Colorado, but Huntsville has always been Trump’s objective, and for even better reasons.
His comments about mail-in voting were definitely meant to trigger leftists, but that’s not his real reason. It’s just icing on his cake and a little padding for his recent vow to end the practice.
The Left, of course, will pretend that Trump is the only vindictive president in history when that’s clearly not the case. “In 2021,” noted Alabama Senator Katie Britt, “the Air Force made a decision to choose Redstone as the preferred basing location purely on merits, as Huntsville finished first in both the Air Force’s Evaluation Phase and Selection Phase. To the detriment of U.S. national security, President Biden chose to undermine the integrity of the process and put politics ahead of merit by yanking this military decision out of the Air Force’s hands.” She expanded on the history and debate in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Likewise, Senator Tommy Tuberville said, “This was never supposed to be about politics. After a thorough selection process involving 66 possible locations, Huntsville was chosen fair and square. But unfortunately, the Biden administration chose politics over national security.”
Colorado Democrat Party chair Shad Murib accused President Trump of making this move “out of pure political spite.” No, Trump, who created the Space Force in the first place, is following the recommendations of multiple military studies, as well as a Government Accountability Office report that the move will save taxpayers nearly half a billion dollars in the coming years.
The truth is that Biden is the spiteful space cadet.
