Has this ever happened to you? It’s a Sunday night, you’re sitting on the couch dreading the upcoming week at the tail end of American democracy, wondering what insane surprises — selling Puerto Rico to the Emiratis, nuking the moon, etc. — our government of, by, and for giggling teenage Nazi eugenicists has in store for us. And then BAM! The boiled sausage casing inhabiting the White House announces he wants to reopen the federal prison on Alcatraz.
Yep, that happened, it was not a hallucination brought on by eating an entire crate of CBD gummies in one sitting.
By now you have probably heard about Donald Trump’s post on his vanity social media site TruthSocial. In it, the president went on one of his overwrought rants about locking up the most vicious “Criminal Offenders” so that they can no longer “spread filth, bloodshed, and mayhem on our streets.” Then he announced he was ordering the Bureau of Prisons, along with the DOJ, the FBI, and DHS to rebuild and reopen the notorious prison on the island in the middle of San Francisco Bay.
We have so many questions. For one thing, we find it interesting that he mentioned not being held hostage to judges along with criminals and thugs. Does he envision locking judges up at the new Alcatraz if they rule against letting him do whatever he wants to undocumented immigrants?
If ever there has been a good example of the absurdity of news outlets that insist on sounding as neutral as the color beige, it was their reaction to Trump’s latest cerebral spasm. There was an immediate flood of anodyne headlines like “Donald Trump’s Alcatraz Prison Idea Faces Scrutiny Over Costs.” Oh, is that what deserves scrutiny here, Newsweek?
This headline concedes the idea that there is a plan, and the announcement wasn’t just one of those brain farts Trump has regularly sharted onto the internet out of nowhere for the last ten years.
Where did Trump come up with this one? We figure the thought process — such as it was — went something like this. Trump spent his weekend at Mar-a-Lago, where it rained too much for him to play golf. So he spent the weekend holed up in his room watching old Burt Lancaster movies. And then this:
Boy, that Burt Lancaster, he was a tough guy. They don’t make movie stars like that anymore. Burt was in some great movies. Like Birdman of Alcatraz. Boy, they sure don’t make movies like that anymore. And they don’t make prisons like Alcatraz anymore. We should reopen Alcatraz and send all the scum there. Where is my phone, I must tweet!
It turns out, we may have been close! A random BlueSky user points out that the PBS station that serves West Palm Beach had aired Escape from Alcatraz with Clint Eastwood on Saturday night. We might have gotten the movie and the star wrong, but we got the basic gist correct:
Or possibly he was watching The Rock and wondering why Sean Connery hasn’t been in any new movies lately.
Is it possible Trump took a break from mainlining Fox News for ten minutes on a Saturday night and channel surfed over to the local PBS station? If so, there is a great irony in his having done so the same week he released a budget calling for the government to stop sending money to PBS. And what else would he be doing on a Saturday night, spending time with friends and loved ones?
There is also the weird possibility that Trump may have gotten the Alcatraz idea from some Twitter rando who tweeted this at him a couple of hours before he made his announcement:
Twitter rando sends that at 4:14 Sunday afternoon, Trump tweets that he’ll reopen Alcatraz at 6:55 Sunday evening, hakuna matata.
We are 99 percent sure reopening Alcatraz will not happen. The only reason we are not 100 percent sure is that our operating rule with Trump for several years now has been to always assume the worst-case scenario. It’s a rule we have failed to remember plenty of times, and we don’t want to let our guard down. Otherwise we’ll spend all our time snorting with disdain, right up to the moment the 101st Airborne occupies Nuuk.
But there are about a million reasons why reopening Alcatraz 60 years after it closed for good is a galactically stupid idea, even by Trump’s standards. Due to its location on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz was way more expensive to operate than any other prison in America. Everything, including fresh water, had to be brought out to it.
Alcatraz was not large. At its peak, the prison held 336 prisoners, or only about 75 more than we just sold off to be slave labor at a mega-prison in El Salvador. The buildings are crumbling due to salt erosion, which was another reason it was closed in the first place. The cost of modernizing the existing structures or just full-on building a new prison would be prohibitive.
Not that cost would bother Trump or the fascists he has empowered, but we would like it if reporters on Capitol Hill were spending today asking our elected representatives why there would be money to reopen Alcatraz but not to continue funding, say, pediatric cancer research.
Trump’s minions immediately sprang into action to try and defend this idea as if it was really a serious one. For example, this MAGA spokesidiot from DHS was on Fox on Monday morning praising Trump for his innovative thinking:
The spokesidiot got one part right, about the symbolism here. Trump’s rotting brain seems stuck in the 1950s, when American manufacturing was booming, racial segregation was still the law of the land in many states, women mostly stayed home, white men were on top, and the word “Alcatraz” was shorthand for a terrifying and brutal place that housed the worst criminals around. We have much more inhumane prisons now (hello, Supermax in Florence Colorado), but none of them has pervaded the cultural imagination the way Alcatraz has.
We’re still 99 percent sure Trump won’t reopen Alcatraz, and 100 percent sure this is far from the dumbest idea he will have had by the end of his term. And the man has nothing but dumb ideas.
[TruthSocial]
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