Following American politics these days forces one to read a dizzying array of bizarre social media posts by President Donald Trump and other members of the Trump administration. Some of them are worthy of news coverage; most aren’t. But there was one on Thursday night that I could not let go unremarked upon.
Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and the architect of Trump’s mass-deportations plan, expressed dismay about a new Star Trek series that debuted this week on Paramount’s streaming service. In the post, Miller shared another post by an account named “End Wokeness” that featured a 15-second clip from Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. The account captioned it with the vague description “Star Trek 2026 … Beyond parody …”
“We’re near the Badlands, Captain,” one character, a half-Klingon, half-Jem’Hadar woman, remarks to the academy’s chancellor, played by Holly Hunter. “Subspace instability may be creeping in, and we’re the first to chart it.” Another crew member, presumably a science officer from her uniform, enters the scene. “This would make an excellent practical study module for the spacial harmonics lab, Captain,” she tells the others. “Alright, but let’s not total the ship on the first try,” Hunter replies.
That’s it. I rewatched the clip a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed something more subtle. Even casual fans know that Star Trek is famous for its progressive themes and messages, but this clip didn’t even have that. It’s literally just three characters talking about spacial anomalies. I’ve seen nearly identical scenes dozens of times in the hundreds of Trek episodes that have been aired over the last six decades. Nor can it be said to be “beyond parody”—Trek’s reliance on “technobabble” for the sake of plot advancement has been widely parodied for decades.
Miller apparently saw something that had eluded me and issued a call to action. “Tragic,” the top White House official declared. “But it’s not too late for [Paramount] to save the franchise. Step 1: Reconcile with [William Shatner] and give him total creative control.” He did not elaborate on any further steps, as if the rest of them were simply too self-evident to mention.
In another context, this might be an amusing post. Fans of Star Trek have been trying to “save” the franchise for the last 60 years. Past generations of fans bemoaned Star Trek: The Next Generation when it first aired; it turned out to be a massive success and is now widely considered to be one of the best television series of all time. I have personally enjoyed parts of the streaming-era Trek shows and disliked (sometimes strongly) other creative decisions. That’s fine. It’s a big universe, and it can’t make everyone happy.
But Miller’s is no normal fan complaint. Miller’s “reconciliation” comment suggests that Shatner is somehow on the outs with Paramount or the broader Star Trek community. It’s true that Shatner has not appeared in any Star Trek productions since his character was killed off in the 1994 film Star Trek Generations, which unsubtly passed the film saga’s torch to the Next Generation crew. (Kirk’s death, which involves him dying on a random planet to help save a civilization that isn’t even shown on-screen, was panned by fans and Shatner himself.) But there is no rift between him and the broader Trek community.
Giving Shatner “creative control” over Star Trek is also a bizarre suggestion for “saving” Star Trek. For one thing, the actor is 94 years old. He appears to be active and in fairly good health, but that is quite an age to ask someone to run a production company’s most famous franchise for the foreseeable future.
Miller’s premise appears to be that Shatner will save Trek from “wokeness.” Consider me skeptical. Shatner, unlike some of his former crewmates, is not very politically outspoken. Part of the reason may be that he is Canadian and lives in the U.S. as a permanent resident. That said, when Trump suggested last year that he wanted Canada to join the United States as a fifty-first state, Shatner publicly rejected the notion by suggesting that the U.S. become Canada’s eleventh province.
This is also the same William Shatner who famously took part in the first interracial kiss in U.S. television history, during Star Trek’s original run in the 1960s—a milestone that is unremarkable today but was momentous in the civil rights era. Shatner later said in interviews that he pushed for the kiss to be filmed and included, overcoming resistance from network executives who feared a revolt by Southern stations and affiliates. (In her biography, Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols wrote that she and Shatner conspired to flub their lines in the alternative cuts of the scene in which they did not kiss that the show’s producers requested, in order to ensure their preferred take was aired.)
We also need not speculate what Shatner would do if he had control over the entire Star Trek franchise. He co-wrote and directed one of the Star Trek feature films in the 1980s. In his original draft for what would become Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Kirk and the Enterprise crew would square off with a televangelist of sorts, modeled after the kind who flourished in Reagan-era America, whose version of God turns out to be Satan. (Substantial rewrites left little of his original vision in the final product.) This was not exactly a MAGA-friendly storyline.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Shatner translated his frustration over his character’s fate into a series of non-canonical Star Trek novels exploring Kirk’s post-Generations resurrection. Fans have (somewhat affectionately) dubbed them the Shatnerverse. In the books, Kirk is brought back to life by the Borg and saved by the Next Generation–era crew. He then marries a half-Klingon, half-Romulan woman—something that the anti-woke folks would hardly tolerate today—and fights his counterpart in the Mirror Universe, who happens to be the cruel, arbitrary emperor of a fascist version of the Federation.
This is characteristic of Stephen Miller’s overall approach to governance, driven by fear and disdain. He sees something that he doesn’t like, comes up with a knee-jerk response to it that makes things worse, and moves on. The White House saw reports of fraud by immigrants in Minnesota, some of which were pushed by misinformed right-wing influencers, and sent thousands of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents to roam Minneapolis and terrorize its residents with random, arbitrary arrests.
What is really reprehensible here isn’t that Stephen Miller doesn’t know ball—or whatever the Trek equivalent of that would be—but the utterly mundane nature of the clip in question. The “wokeness” isn’t anything from Star Trek that might obviously touch a right-wing nerve today. It’s not a scene from the 1992 episode where one of the main characters, who is typically depicted as a ladies’ man, falls in love with what would now be described as a nonbinary character. Nor is it a clip involving the Deep Space Nine character whose experiences with changing genders have resonated among transgender viewers.
It’s just three women talking. That’s all. That’s what they consider “wokeness” and “beyond parody.” If they said this at a Star Trek convention, they would be mocked and jeered for how pathetic they sound. What we have instead is a top White House official publicly urging a company whose owners have close ties to the president to scrap a television show with women and minorities in the case, so that a 94-year-old white man—one who probably isn’t even interested in the job—can take over. They cannot conceive of a world that does not cater to their every whim, and they will burn ours down to slake their own insecurities.
