Trump boasts new Space Force uniforms are 'inspired' by famous satire of Nazism

This story originally appeared on Them.

One of my most deeply held cinematic pet peeves is the fact that there are still people who do not get that Starship Troopers was a satire. Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 sci-fi action flick certainly doesn’t hide the fact that the film’s “good guys” are, in fact, not so good after all. The fictional interstellar military at the heart of the film dresses up in Nazi uniforms, mainlines state propaganda, and tries to exterminate anything they don’t understand. In fact, the imitation of the SS aesthetic was so good that even many critics initially thought that Verhoeven was endorsing what he sought to criticize when, in fact, he just wanted to carry the conservative draw toward authoritarianism to its natural endpoint.

“If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me,” the director later said of his approach to the film. “So I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it’s only good for killing f*****g Bugs!”

Starship Troopers has since been reevaluated to the point where almost any discussion of it now opens with the fact that it is meant to skewer Nazism and its underlying, violent ideologies. Verhoeven was raised in Nazi-occupied Holland and thanks to all the interviews he’s given about the film amid its critical resurgence, almost anyone who isn’t a teenager sneaking a watch of the movie for the first time would be unable to escape that fact. I say almost because apparently Donald Trump thinks that the Starship Troopers guys are good and cool.

The president took to Truth Social over the weekend to share uniform designs for the Space Force, a branch of the armed forces established in 2019, during his first administration. Housed in the Department of the Air Force, the Space Force is intended to “protect and defend American interests in space,” according to its website, and claimed to have “more than 14,000 military and civilian Guardians” by 2024. On September 3, General Douglas A. Schiess was sworn in on September 3 as Chief of Space Operations — the highest-uniformed rank in the Space Force.

But Trump seems more concerned with how his hypothetical space army looks than with the actual affairs of the branch. On September 6, he posted an image purporting to show the “service dress uniform” for the Space Force and wow! From the cap to the epaulettes to the color scheme, you’d have to have been raised without television not to have drawn immediate comparisons to the Imperial officers in Star Wars. But shockingly, the image Trump posted admits that the uniforms are “inspired by the discipline and the functionality of the Starship Troopers uniform.”

In other words, the Space Force service dress uniform design revealed by the president was inspired by a movie that itself drew explicit aesthetic inspiration from Nazi uniforms. The transitive property would seem to suggest that the Space Form uniform is inspired by the most evil fascist military in the modern history of the world — which, given the actions of this administration, might be a feature, not a bug (pun intended).

Indeed, this isn’t the first time that the Trump camp has directly claimed the bad guys in a sci-fi movie. In 2020, amid his unsuccessful bid for a second consecutive term, higher-ups in his reelection campaign compared their operation to the Death Star — you know, the fictional battle station responsible for killing well over a million people.

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