Trump to Alabama: The Space Command is in the mail

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The truth should be enough. Only Donald Trump is so unfamiliar with facts and truth that he doesn’t seem to know what to do when he finds them on his side.

According to no fewer than five evaluations conducted by the Air Force, the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Defense Inspector General, the best home for Space Command is Huntsville, Ala.

That should be sufficient.

Instead, America’s headquarters for defending the “high horizon” has become a political ping-pong ball — bouncing between Alabama and Colorado, a site that didn’t even come in second place in those studies.

Where it is now — and where it’s going next — has been more dependent on which party holds White House than what makes sense for our national defense. Moving it back and forth every four years doesn’t work for anybody.

But thanks to Donald Trump, this silly, dangerous game might go on forever.

All the president had to do was stick to the script. Facts, history, reason — all these things were on his side on Tuesday, as he stood in the Oval Office with Alabama’s congressional Republicans, to make the announcement.

But he couldn’t help himself. He had to get that dig in against a state that hasn’t supported him any time he’s run. Colorado opened its door for cheating — what the president calls any situation where he doesn’t win — and that’s why Space Command can’t stay there, he said.

“The problem I have with Colorado — one of the big problems — they do mail-in voting,” Trump 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, because that’s what that means. So that played a big factor.”

Reality is never Trump’s strong suit. He began the press conference bragging that the move would bring 30,000 jobs to Huntsville, which he said would soon be called the Rocket City.

Of course, Huntsville already calls itself that. It has for quite some time. And according to Sen. Katie Britt later in that same press conference, the move stands to create 1,600 new jobs in Alabama directly, along with 3,000 indirect jobs created.

So 4,600 jobs? We’ll take it!

Again, the truth here should be sufficient. But no. This wasn’t about Alabama. Trump had to make it about him. Colorado’s voting practices were very much on Trump’s mind — so much so that he came back to it again later in his meandering press conference.

“The problem with Colorado is they have a very corrupt voting system,” he said after a reporter asked whether people there would be willing to move to Alabama. “Look, I have so many friends in Colorado. Anytime you have mail-in voting, you have corrupt elections. Very simple. It’s very simple.”

And with that, Trump set the table for the next Democratic president to undo what he’s now done twice.

This isn’t the first time Trump has done this, either. Ahead of a 2021 rally in Cullman, Ala., Trump bragged on the Rick & Bubba show that he alone had made Huntsville Space Command’s home (and also mixed it up with Space Force, which is not the same thing).

“Space Force — I sent to Alabama,” Trump told his Alabama radio show hosts then. “I hope you know that. (They) said they were looking for a home and I single-handedly said, ‘Let’s go to Alabama.’ They wanted it. I said, ‘Let’s go to Alabama.’ I love Alabama.”

Reality check: That’s not how the selection process worked at all, but reality wasn’t enough for Trump.

The irony here is that — between Trump’s boasting on the radio and Tommy Tuberville’s obstructionism holding up military promotions in the Senate — they made an opening for the Biden Administration to subordinate national interest to partisan stakes.

Every time Trump says, I put it in Alabama because (I wanted to/I love Alabama/Colorado cheats), he gives the next guy a basis for moving it back.

So we could go on doing this forever — always moving, never set.

Space Command is lost in the mail.