CNN
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Reopening Alcatraz is such a quintessentially Trumpian idea that it’s a miracle the president didn’t try to do it before.
Locking down offenders in tiny cells on an island surrounded by swirling, murderous currents would feed President Donald Trump’s craving for macho spectacle.
Years after its closure in 1963, the prison became a pop culture icon with a lore spun from notorious tales of gangster inmates like Al Capone and movies featuring desperados and rough justice — long fascinations of the president. Its notorious legacy perfectly matches the ruthless imagery the White House is weaving as it pursues hardline criminal justice and mass deportation plans.
Recommissioning the Rock would bolster Trump’s own self-styled strongman aura and make him look merciless — the goal behind many White House policies. While liberals are likely to be horrified by the idea, those Trump supporters who respond to his dystopian theatrics might nod their heads and consider it common sense as a new home for the worst of the worst.
The president is not disguising the attraction of Alcatraz as an allegory for his leadership, calling the island “a sad symbol, but it’s a symbol of law and order,” on Sunday. On Monday he recalled for reporters at the White House that the former prison once held “the most violent criminals in the world.”
Of course, reviving Alcatraz, off San Francisco, as a federal prison is deeply impractical and could waste of millions of dollars at a time when Elon Musk has been slashing federal government funding. Bringing it up to modern standards — not necessarily for the inmates, but just to ensure prison officers who’d have to work there are safe — would be a huge task. And the administration’s cavalier approach to its deportations and the rule of law raises serious red flags about what kind of due process potential Alcatraz inmates could expect.
But Trump’s administration has never been about good governance above all.
If the president’s goal is to incarcerate the worst kind of offenders, he could choose the federal Supermax prison in Colorado, for instance — an isolated, spartan facility that shoe bomber Richard Reid, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and Oklahoma City co-conspirator Terry Nichols will never leave. But prisoners are sent to Supermax to disappear from public consciousness — that’s part of the punishment, along with their multiple life sentences.
Trump has already tried to send undocumented migrants to Guantanamo Bay. He eyed a separate facility at the base on Cuba than the one that holds 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the dark connotations of the name were the point.
Reopening Alcatraz would be the ultimate iteration of this strategy, creating a living symbol of the president’s choreographed strength and his mockery of political correctness.
And even if years of administrative delays, legal challenges and other impediments mean Trump will never get the prison reopened, he’s already got the headline.
The plan would have another advantage for Trump. Alcatraz 2.0 would shame the psyche of one of the nation’s most liberal cities, which just happens to be home to a presidential nemesis — House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. The California lawmaker dismissed Trump’s latest wheeze with the scorn she reserves for her former adversary. “Alcatraz closed as a federal penitentiary more than sixty years ago. It is now a very popular national park and major tourist attraction. The President’s proposal is not a serious one,” Pelosi wrote on X.
But could a president who admires dictators choose a better metaphor for his second administration than turning a tourist hot spot into a bleak gulag that revives the hard-knocks justice of a less enlightened age?
Trump’s presidencies often seem to unfold as a succession of televised stunts and outlandish concepts. In his first term, the idea that the former “Apprentice” star’s tenure was an extended reality show became an overused cliche.
Late in that initial mandate, many of Trump’s staged spectacles became increasingly troubling — like his march into Washington’s Lafayette Square when it had just been violently cleared of protesters. Senior aides alongside him included then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who later apologized for taking part in a politicized photo-op, making an enemy of the president.
Trump’s rally on the Ellipse in Washington on January 6, 2021, meanwhile, set the stage for one of the darkest moments in American history — the assault on the US Capitol by his mob of MAGA supporters.
In the second term, the administration’s political choreography has consciously struck authoritarian overtones. The president said “I don’t know” over the weekend when asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker whether he needs to uphold the Constitution. And Trump is planning to hold a military parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Army on his own birthday — an event likely to recall the pageants of missiles and tanks beloved by former Soviet leaders.
Often, the president’s wild schemes seem calculated to distract. His notion to reopen Alcatraz might have been timed to draw attention from those remarks on NBC, or to try to make people forget that he still hasn’t produced a single promised trade deal after repeatedly predicting imminent breakthroughs as the economy reels from his haphazard tariff wars. There is good reason for Trump to try to change the subject: the lack of any substantive talks with China, currently laboring under a 145% tariff imposed by a president piqued by Beijing’s retaliation, threatens to soon cause a major crisis.
At other times, Trump seems motivated simply by a love of the spotlight itself. His taste for pomp was sated by his state visit to see the late Queen Elizabeth II in his first term. King Charles III has invited him for a reprise.
And Trump’s summits with reclusive North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un, whom he’d previously mocked as “little rocket man,” count among the most stunning diplomatic occasions in recent decades. At one meeting, the president stepped into the hermit kingdom — creating a piece of history for himself. The photo-ops were amazing and transfixed the globe. But the summitry failed to achieve significant long-term breakthroughs eradicating the North’s missile and nuclear programs. Still, Trump could argue that no other modern president had any more luck pursuing traditional diplomacy, engagement or punishments for North Korea.
At other times, Trump’s theatrical style backfired or offended. For example, when he stood in front of the CIA’s Wall of Stars memorializing fallen officers and boasted about the size of his first inaugural crowd in 2017. On another occasion, Trump turned a Boy Scout Jamboree into a self-serving political rally.
But Trump’s flair for the theatrical has also helped him alchemize extreme circumstances into political gold. The mug shot taken at a Georgia jail following one of his criminal indictments would have ended the career of any other politician. Trump used it as a launchpad for the most stunning political comeback in American history. And after cheating death at the hands of a would-be assassin, he had the presence of mind to rise to his feet, clench his fist and create one of the most indelible images in the history of the republic.
That moment was consistent with the common thread running through the president’s political performance art, which has an irresistible appeal to his base but reminds critics of a demagogue who disdains democracy. Whether he’s signing executive orders on stage after his second inauguration, posing at the White House as a conquering hero after returning from hospital after surviving Covid-19, or sending undocumented migrants to El Salvador in shackles, Trump poses as a modern Caesar wielding ruthless power.
That mindset is what produced his order to the Bureau of Prisons to reopen Alcatraz.
