\n<\/p>\n
Donald Trump made his first public appearance in a week on Tuesday to announce that the US Space Command (Spacecom) headquarters, which is tasked with leading national security operations in space, would be in the Republican stronghold of Alabama.<\/p>\n
Flanked by Republican senators and members of Congress at a White House news conference, Trump said Huntsville, Alabama, would be the new location of the space command. The move reverses a Biden administration decision to put the facility at its current temporary headquarters in Democratic-leaning Colorado.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US 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,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWe had a lot of competition but Alabama\u2019s getting it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The move would result in more than 30,000 new jobs and bring hundreds of billions of dollars to Alabama, a state which voted for Trump \u201cby about 47 points\u201d, the president said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey fought harder for it than anyone else,\u201d Trump claimed, before adding that Colorado\u2019s decision to allow mail-in voting was \u201ccorrupt\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems, [is that] they do mail-in voting,\u201d he said. \u201cSo they have automatically crooked elections and we can\u2019t have that. When a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections. So that played a big factor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huntsville is already home to the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Nasa\u2019s Marshall Space Flight center and the 38,000-acre Redstone Arsenal. The city was identified by the US air force as its preferred site for Space Command in 2021 as it would be a cost-effective option. A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) later found that the air force\u2019s decision-making process had \u201csignificant shortfalls in its transparency and credibility\u201d.<\/p>\n
Two years later, in 2023, Biden overturned those plans to relocate to Alabama. Instead, Biden chose to make the then temporary Colorado Springs location permanent, taking a recommendation from Gen James Dickinson, the former head of Space Command. Dickinson reportedly said relocating to Alabama could jeopardize military readiness as making the headquarters fully operational would take time.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor FOUR YEARS, I have fought to get U.S. Space Command moved to its SELECTED home at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama,\u201d Senator Tommy Tuberville wrote alongside a video statement after Trump\u2019s announcement. \u201cThank you, President Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, for reversing Joe Biden\u2019s political cronyism and restoring MERIT and INTEGRITY to this process.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tuberville lambasted Biden\u2019s 2023 decision to keep Spacecom in Colorado Springs in his video and said the former president let the \u201cnation\u2019s security [take] a backseat to politics\u201d and \u201ccaved\u201d to \u201cwoke politics\u201d at the time. He then thanked Trump for \u201crestoring merit and integrity\u201d to space exploration and alleged the move would save taxpayers $480m.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s announcement of a change of course followed days of fevered online speculation about his health, fueled by his absence from the public eye since last week.<\/p>\n
Asked if he was aware that there had been 1.3m social media engagements as of Saturday morning speculating on his possible \u201cdemise\u201d, Trump countered that he had held several news conferences in the past week and pointed to some \u201cpretty poignant\u201d posts he had made on his Truth Social platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did numerous news conferences, all successful. They went very well, like this is going very well. And then I didn\u2019t do any for two days, and they said, \u2018There must be something wrong with him,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBiden wouldn\u2019t do them for months, you wouldn\u2019t see him, and nobody ever said there was ever anything wrong with him \u2013 and we know he wasn\u2019t in the greatest of shape. It\u2019s all fake news.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speculation about Trump\u2019s health has recently intensified. Some of the fervor has been spurred by a White House disclosure that he was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition involving damage to the veins in the arms and legs. There has also been viral pictures showing Trump with swollen ankles and bruising on his hands.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in his announcement, Trump indicated that he had decided to send armed troops into Chicago, allegedly to fight crime. Such a move is against the will of JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, and follows the recent controversial deployment of national guard forces in Washington on the same purported basis.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going in,\u201d he said, calling Chicago and Baltimore \u2013 another Democratic-run city \u2013 \u201chellholes\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said the deployment of national guard troops in Washington DC had \u201cserved as a template,\u201d adding: \u201cI\u2019m very proud of Washington. [It\u2019s] a safe zone.\u201d<\/p>\n