When you go to graduate school to earn a Ph.D. in political science, you learn about lots of things. But there are some parts of our political system that are really, really tough to truly learn about. Make sense (ed: not so much…)?

In political science, there are lots of things that we can know, exactly. For example, we can get up-to-date statistics on the unemployment rate, on the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line, or above the line that makes you really, really rich. We can look at election results in an effort to understand and then predict what will happen in the future.

Political scientists often love those numbers. My own Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan (Hey ed, can I say ‘Go Blue’ here, given the football playoff? (ed: no)), lots of professors poured over lots and lots of numbers to learn things about some aspect of our political system or other political systems around the globe.

Using a variety of methods, these professors do regression analysis, chi-squared evaluations and lots and lots of other mathematical metrics to see what has happened and what is likely to happen. If you’ve ever gotten an actual political pollster calling you on the phone, you will remember that, in addition to asking about issue positions, they likely also asked your age, income level and other demographic information that will help to understand, and ultimately to predict, political behaviors.

But there is one roughly six-inch gap in the knowledge of most of these political scientists that really mess things up – the six inches of grey matter between the ears of policy makers. What goes on inside an individual’s brain is incredibly difficult to measure – so difficult in fact that many poli-sci studies ignore the impact of the “individual actor” entirely and only focus on more easily measured broader behavioral trends, like voting outcomes. And that has always bothered me. Who is in charge matters because of their grey matter, and how they use it.

Which, of course, brings us to the great state of Alabama and the mystery that is Donald Trump’s brain.

You likely recall from earlier Colorado Politics stories that in the waning days of the Trump administration, those dark January days that followed his defeat at the polls, as he mused over various constitutional and unconstitutional ways to stay in office, Trump did a petulant and silly thing: he announced that he was ordering the moving of U.S. Space Command from its home in Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. Trump later bragged that he didn’t listen to a single outside voice or advisor; rather be boasted that “I single-handedly said let’s go to Alabama.”

When one considers the facts of the matter, such a move makes little to no sense at all. Colorado Springs is already home to a vast military infrastructure (which is what brought me here in 1987) and billions (with a “b”) of dollars of investment into the remarkable and quite expensive hardware and software needed for a national space defense. Huntsville does have a fine history of space operations, but that lovely city is home to a completely different kind of space operations. Huntsville is all about sending people into space and testing rockets. Space Command, on the other hand, has to do with early warning of attack and other space-based operations that should not be detailed in any rambling essay such as this one.

Asking political scientists to explain Trump’s decision defies the use of traditional predictive “models” for political behavior. You can’t explain the decision based on logic, evidence or reason. You can’t even study the steps that Trump took with the bureaucracy that led him to make this critical decision.

Nope, political scientists are not much help when the only explanation is the incoherent and vindictive thought process of an intellectually dim but vituperative individual. Simply put, what does Alabama have that Colorado does not, in the mind of Trump?

Is it the infrastructure to support space operations? Nope. Is it the vast pool of civilian employees that are needed for such operations? Nope. Is it the great relations the several key military bases here in Colorado have with the state and local governments? Nope.

What Alabama does have are lots more Trump voters.

Colorado, fully primed and ready to continue performing key space operations, voted for Biden. Alabama did not. So, you must ask yourself, do you really think that Donald Trump is so petty, so vindictive, so deeply immature and spiteful that for no reasons other than his personal pity party he decided to disrupt space operations, spend billions of dollars unnecessarily and to displace thousands of military and civilian workers?

Yup.

A recent Colorado Politics story noted that a final decision by the Biden administration is due soon on whether to keep the Trump move on schedule or whether to toss it entirely and leave Space Command where it belongs in Colorado Springs. No issue, as you will see when you read the story, has united our elected officials, regardless of political party, in the way the entirely-Trump decision to move Space Command did. Heck, I even agree with U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn (against whom I ran for Congress back in 2008). In a massive understatement, Lamborn noted, “I believe, based on inside information, that politics must have played a role…” Yup.

Future political science professors will have a hard time studying the Space Command decision, whichever way it turns out. None of the mathematical models used to predict bureaucratic behavior will work here. One can only understand the decision if you are able to get inside a mind that is vain, foolish, angry, bitter and vindictive as heck. I think we can take Trump as his word on this one: he did it all himself. That alone should be a good reason to revisit the decision. Until then, it’s wait and see.

Will we waste billions and disrupt thousands of lives because for one brief term a truly foolish and spiteful person was elected president?

I certainly hope not.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.