Denver TV news anchor Kyle Clark is putting President Donald Trump on blast for relocating U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama, apparently to penalize Colorado for offering mail-in voting.
The 9News anchor had one word for these punitive measures Tuesday: authoritarianism.
“There’s an argument that Space Command truly belongs in Alabama,” Clark said on his show. “But President Trump makes clear, in word and in deed, what this is really about for him: It’s about using the military for his personal advantage in domestic policies.”
The “Next With Kyle Clark” host also pointed to the federal takeover of Washington, D.C., and predicted that states or cities that overwhelmingly vote for Trump likewise “won’t be targeted with troop deployments.”
“Vote for him, and your cities won’t be targeted with troop deployments. Vote for him and keep your military installations,” Clark added. “If all of this was happening in another nation, we would not hesitate to describe it clearly. If it was Kazakhstan instead of Colorado, Caracas instead of Chicago, we would call it by name — it’s authoritarianism.”
Trump stated Tuesday that he “initially selected Huntsville” for Space Command headquarters during his first term, only for former President Joe Biden to “wrongfully” change course after the 2020 election.
“I will say, I want to thank Colorado,” Trump told reporters. “The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems: They do mail-in voting. They went to all mail-in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections. And we can’t have that. … So that played a big factor, also.”
Trump has notably blamed his 2020 loss on “corrupt” mail-in ballots, though the president has voted by mail himself.
Former Colorado Springs Mayor John W. Suthers, a Republican, told Denver7 that relocating Space Command could take years, cost billions of dollars and devastate the local workforce, since many of the estimated 800 Coloradans employed at Space Command might not be willing to move.
“It’s time that we are clear about what’s happening,” Clark said Tuesday, noting that Trump is openly punishing a state that didn’t vote for him and rewarding another that did. The president is “linking military decision-making to his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. That’s a dangerous escalation.”
“Trump says that Colorado, where he lost badly, has automatically crooked elections, echoing something that he says Russian President Vladimir Putin recently told him.”
The president did say the Russian autocrat warned him about mail-in voting at their recent summit. He told Fox News host Sean Hannity: “You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things. He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’”