--- title: George Takei Blasts Donald Trump at Intrepid Museum description: A man who spent part of his childhood in a Japanese Internment camp has a few words for the candidate who wants to build a wall canonical: https://time.com/4389864/george-takei-blasts-donald-trump/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-06-30T22:22:30.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-06T09:39:28.225Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Watch George Takei Blast Donald Trump og:description: George Takei has a few words for the candidate who wants to build a wall og:url: https://time.com/4389864/george-takei-blasts-donald-trump/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt52f27a5f4f7dedb9/69889a4b0a4a2249bf9ca514/george_takei.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: George Takei og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Watch George Takei Blast Donald Trump twitter:description: George Takei has a few words for the candidate who wants to build a wall twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt52f27a5f4f7dedb9/69889a4b0a4a2249bf9ca514/george_takei.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Watch George Takei Blast Donald Trump > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=81ffc2cc-b6af-40ac-a6d9-a79d43fab510&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Watch George Takei Blast Donald Trump [Watch (HLS stream): Watch George Takei Blast Donald Trump](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/t0o9n3cg.m3u8) (2:33)  _Published 2016-06-30. A man who spent part of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp has a few words for the candidate who wants to build a wall._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jun 30, 2016 10:22 PM UTC  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Jun 30, 2016 10:22 PM UTC If you didn’t spend your morning standing on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and then talking to George Takei, the actor, author, activist and playwright who created the role of Lt. Sulu in the original Star Trek series, well, that’s just because you weren’t at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York this morning. TIME was lucky enough to be there for a preview of the museum’s interactive Star Trek exhibit, which opens on July 9, and [streamed our conversations with Takei and NASA astronaut Mike Massimino live on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/time/videos/10153802642206491/). The talk was mostly space and science, but Takei had other things on his mind too. As part of the conspicuously multi-cultural cast of the original Star Trek, Takei has always felt deeply about the importance of a color-blind and race-blind society. And as a person who spent part of his childhood in an American internment camp — just one of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans rounded up in the hysteria that followed Pearl Harbor — he knows a thing or two about what happens when xenophobia and racism overtake reason. On that score, as the video shows, he has some strong words for presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. ## Transcript How do you think space travel will be affected under either a President Clinton or a President Trump? It will be a dramatic difference. [ LAUGH ] Tell me in what way? Well Trump wants to cut ourselves off from the rest of the planet, build walls, ban others of certain faiths. He will not have the vision to go out there. Hillary Clinton has served as Secretary of State. She is a global figure. And certainly her past [ INAUDIBLE ] looking out globally as well as out into the galaxy. And so, we will live long and prosper with Hillary Clinton. Are you getting involved in the campaign politics? Tell us a little bit about what you're doing. Well a certainly. I just closed in a Broadway musical titled Allegiance. It's about the imprisonment of innocent American citizens of a certain ancestry. Japanese ancestry because during the Second World War the people that bombed Pearl Harbor happened to look like us. And this in one of the failures of American. Democracy, where people were swept up by hysteria and imprisoned, innocent people en masse. This is the thinking of Donald Trump. When he made that statement about banning Muslims, I thought he needed to learn from a chapter of American history that we were dramatizing on On the Broadway stage. So I extended an invitation to him as my guest, to come see Allegiance. I made that invitation personally as well as publicly, on talk shows as well as on social. We even saved a seat, [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Big sign saying, this seat reserved for Mr. Donald Trump, and we had a countdown for the number of performances that he missed since my invitation. He never came and he missed something like 79, but he could learn from our past and that's why and he really doesn't know our past. And that's why I don't see him seeing the future. 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