Kelsey Grammer's Age Of MAGA Extinction

How did a Transformers movie get so woke?

Kelsey Grammer, who you remember as either Frasier Crane or Sideshow Bob, was a guest on white Super Bowl nationalist Megyn Kelly’s show earlier this month, and the actor praised Donald Trump’s job performance. (He wasn’t acting, though.)

“I think he’s doing really well. It’s annoying to a lot of people,” Grammer said. “I think he’s doing a wonderful job.”

“It’s not popular sometimes, but the man speaks his mind and you know where he stands,” he went on, “I’ve never seen a more transparent presidency in my life.”

Look, if you support Trump’s lawless corruption and brutality, that’s your right. It’s still a free country, but you can’t just invent some alternate reality where Trump is a boisterous straight shooter. He’s not LBJ as played by Clancy Brown or John C. McGinley.

Grammar’s political leanings are no secret. He was openly Republican back when his substance abuse and sexual misconduct allegations would have ended a political career. Now, he could easily serve in Trump’s Cabinet.

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My son and I have been watching the live-action Transformers movies whenever my wife is out of town (smart move on her part). He loves them, which is enough for me. Kelsey Grammer is the main villain in the fourth Transformers film, Age of Extinction. Although, after watching it, I can’t help wondering if Grammer actually thinks he was the hero.

Age of Extinction is an overtly anti-MAGA movie, despite coming out during the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. That might make the message more salient, because a summer action movie with robot dinosaurs tends to present “good” versus “evil” in what it assumes are universally agreed-upon terms. (They want to make money everywhere.) If those terms are now up for debate, it only highlights our nation’s open moral decay.

The film’s human lead is Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), a single dad and struggling inventor. He’s from Texas, so already we know he’s not an obvious bleeding-heart, city-dwelling liberal. He’s meant to represent “traditional” America. He wears ball caps and faded t-shirts over his anti-dad bod. Yeager discovers a broken-down semi-truck that he takes home to repair. It turns out this is Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) in disguise. He was badly injured in battle but not by his enemies the Decepticons. He was ambushed by humans. Actual Decepticons could have never done such a number on Prime, but humans got close enough to almost kill him because he trusted them. That betrayal cuts deeper than his physical wounds.

The official story is that after the events of the past movie, Dark of the Moon, when Decepticons leveled Chicago and almost destroyed the planet, humanity (well, specifically the United States) considers all Transformers a hostile threat. Of course, the heroic Autobots helped save the world, and actual humans had collaborated with the evil Decepticons. This complexity escapes the small-minded. Age of Extinction was released in 2014, and it recalls the post-9/11 period when far too many Americans viewed all Muslims as potential terrorists. A year later, Donald Trump would call for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” That’s how quickly dystopian sci-fi fiction became reality.

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Humans believe that while the government has imposed a total and complete shutdown of Transformers entering the planet, the Autobots who are already here and peaceful were granted sanctuary. However, Grammer’s character Harold Attinger leads a CIA black ops group that’s actually hunting down Transformers, regardless of status or affiliation. The black ops group is known as “Cemetery Wind,” because only obvious bad guys adopt such perverse naming. That’s why Donald Trump calls the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” like a supervillain who think “Legion of Doom” is subtle.

We see federal agents hunt down the Autobot medic Ratchet and summarily execute him. This is a war crime, of course, but genocide is the government’s unofficial policy.

Ratchet, retreating and defenseless, tells Attinger’s second-in-command, James Savoy (Titus Welliver) that Autobots aren’t a threat. They’re only hiding from the actual violent threat. Savoy responds that his sister died in Chicago, so he has no sympathy for Ratchet. This doesn’t humanize him. His sister’s unfortunate death is only a justification for his cruelty.

Age of Extinction makes a point of stressing that Cemetery Wind is an unofficial, black ops group, one that’s secret to even the president. This was once a common narrative device in film and TV, as not even conspiracy theorists would imagine that elected officials would openly support such blatantly immoral, unconstitutional actions. Now, someone like Savoy would have a public-facing role in the Department of Homeland Security. He’d give press conferences blaming Autobots for their own deaths.

Meanwhile, Cade has repaired a recovering Optimus Prime. However, his business partner Lucas (T.J. Miller) has notified the authorities, hoping for a reward. This isn’t presented as a patriotic act, but rather short-sighted, selfish greed that will result in his death. Soon, Cemetery Wind has surged onto Cade’s home. When Cade asks to see a warrant — a reasonable request in America, Savoy replies, “My face is my warrant.” Surely, no normal, sane federal agent would ever talk like this. (Watch below.)

Cade is harboring an illegal alien, who the corrupt government has now deemed a dangerous criminal, but he still won’t turn over Prime to these armed thugs. This scene hits different today: Federal agents have Americans pinned to the ground with guns pointed at them — openly threatening their lives to get the information they want. “I’m a citizen!” Lucas shouts, but that no longer matters.

Attinger sees that Cade won’t budge but he notices how worried he is for his daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz). He tells Savoy, “Use the girl,” and the coward puts a gun to her head and starts counting down. That’s when Optimus Prime reveals himself and starts messing fools up. “Here I am!” he exclaims. Yes, my son and I cheered. (Watch below.)

Cade and his family go on the run with Optimus and the surviving Autobots. They confront billionaire tech CEO Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) who is building his own Transformers with technology his company is harvesting from Transformer corpses, including Ratchet. Yes, this should remind you of something. Joyce accuses the Autobots of showing their “true colors” because they broke into his property to stop his Mengele experiments. Like Attinger and Savoy, he considers them “terrorists” because they dare to defend themselves.

Joyce eventually joins the good guys after refusing to take part in Attinger’s evil scheme. That’s perhaps the film’s biggest blind spot in retrospect — the notion that tech geniuses are fundamentally decent. “Look, I know you have a conscience,” Cade tells Joyce, “because you’re an inventor, like me.” That’s adorable. Elon Musk is just as unhinged and bigoted as people like Savoy. He’d post social media screeds arguing that the mere existence of Autobots promotes human genocide. Other billionaire CEOs like Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg would happily align themselves with someone like Attinger if it preserved their bottom line.

Age of Extinction has a straightforward message of unity, which in 2026 makes the film openly progressive. Attinger’s literal last lines are “There are no good aliens and bad aliens, just us and them and you chose them!” to which Cade responds, “Any time.” This is what we should say to all the Stephen Millers and JD Vances of the world. (Oh, yes, Optimus Prime kills a human on screen for the first time, and it’s MAGA Frasier. Fox News would have a weeks-long freak out if the film were released today.)

When ICE agents executed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, MAGA types made the “you chose them” argument when minimizing their deaths. You wonder if they realize how much like two-dimensional villains they sound. I presume Kelsey Grammer just cashed his paycheck and went home, but he might want to rewatch Age of Extinction and consider what side he’s on now.