Trump Loves Alcatraz, Because Trump Loves Infamy

Any person who claims to know exactly what is going on in the mind of our addled, deeply unwell President, the man who recently posted “praise be to Allah” online on Easter morning, is a shameless liar. No one on Earth would have predicted the President of the United States would post that, 24 hours earlier. That said, there are certain traits and tics of Donald John Trump that are extremely predictable, where anyone with the most basic psychological profile of the President can understand the childlike impulses that drive some of his particular fixations and fascinations. And one of the very easiest things to understand about Trump is the fact that he cares far more about appearances than he cares about reality. He cares about prestige; he cares about what he sees as the marketing potential of symbolism; he cares about shit that looks or sounds cool to the average 12-year-old brain. So it should really be no surprise that he’s always loved the idea of somehow transforming San Francisco’s infamous former island penitentiary Alcatraz back into a functioning federal prison, because Trump cares more about imagery than he does about whether something is valuable, feasible or even possible.

When Trump first randomly announced the idea via Truth Social last year, it inspired the typical rounds of confusion and ridicule both at home and abroad–The New York Times amusingly interviewed tourists passing through the former prison, who were saying things like “I thought it was a joke; it’s a ruin, isn’t it, more or less?” Well yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean anything to a person to whom logic and reality do not apply. At Splinter, we wondered aloud whether it was possible that Trump had simply happened to catch a recent basic cable rerun of Michael Bay’s 1996 action classic The Rock, and became confused and agitated as a result. And honestly, that might not be far off–it would hardly be the first time that Trump had seemingly cited rationales for his actions based on things he’d seen in movies. As he put it at the time:

“I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders. We will no longer be held hostage to criminals, thugs, and Judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals, who came into our Country illegally. The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE.”

At the time, at least, the idea of the government actually doing something to renovate Alcatraz could simply be ignored as the feverish product of a 79-year-old child’s mind. Now, though, it’s an idea with a budget line behind it: The 2027 fiscal year budget proposal released at the end of last week includes $152 million in its ask from Congress specifically ticketed for the first year of costs for the “President’s commitment to rebuild Alcatraz as a state-of-the-art secure prison facility.”

The obscenity of a budget that cuts the forest service to fund the re-opening of Alcatraz as a prison.

— Philip Gourevitch (@pgourevitch.bsky.social) Apr 3, 2026 at 9:55 PM

It’s an idea that is absurd on numerous fronts. To begin with, the amount requested is a tiny drop in the bucket of what it would actually cost the federal government to turn the small island in San Francisco Bay (it only ever housed just over 300 people at a time) into some kind of functioning, modern prison facility. Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco observed as much, calling the idea “not a serious proposal” and refusing to even bother commenting further. On the topic of mere infrastructure, Alcatraz is little more than a preserved historical relic at this point: The buildings have crumbled and deteriorated to the point that most no longer have roofs. There is no running water or sewage system left on the island, and the exterior walls are covered with netting to keep falling chunks of concrete from injuring tourists. All supplies and visitors must arrive by boat, leaving the facilities mostly claimed by seabirds, who have deposited decades of guano over basically every surface. It hasn’t housed a prisoner in 62 years, since its closure in 1963 … which was ordered because it was already crumbling at the time. Six more decades being beaten by the wind and rain have done little to improve matters from a structural standpoint. Actually turning the island into a functional prison would quite obviously require leveling anything of historical importance and starting all over again, only to build something far smaller than the average federal prison at astronomical expense.

Secondly, Alcatraz remains very valuable despite its ruinous condition, because it’s an extremely popular tourist destination–one that brings in international travelers who come to California and San Francisco specifically to visit it alongside other Bay Area landmarks. More than 1.4 million visitors go on the official Alcatraz tour every year, bringing in significant revenue for the National Park Service and Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It’s been listed on the register of National Historic Landmarks since 1986. Leave it to Trump to look at one of the country’s single most popular and lucrative tourist destinations and think “this is obviously the place to house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders.”

Even the imposing reputation of the prison as foreboding and “inescapable” is rather overblown, in fact, which is another part of the reason it was closed. John Martini, an Alcatraz historian and tour guide who has volunteered on the island for 25 years, told NYT that the facility was actually prone to escapes, and that “dozens of people” escaped from it in its earlier days when Alcatraz was operating as a U.S. military prison. At least five people also disappeared during its era as a federal prison from 1934 to 1963, and are still listed as potential escapees–the final ones, as depicted/dramatized in 1979’s Escape From Alcatraz, managed to dig their way out of their flimsy cells with SPOONS of all things, the walls having already become so weak at that point that their escape was relatively easy. Suffice to say, the people of San Francisco weren’t thrilled about the idea of the federal prison just offshore continuing to operate when prisoners could simply dig through its walls, and it closed shortly thereafter.

You know what Alcatraz needs?
…
…
…
…
BALLROOM!

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— Rex Huppke (@rexhuppke.bsky.social) Apr 3, 2026 at 1:10 PM

But for Trump, of course, it’s not actually about whether the site can accommodate prisoners, or could be made to accommodate them, or whether there would be the tiniest logical point do doing so–all that matters to him is that he recognizes the term “Alcatraz,” and as we all know that sounds cool. Why, oh reader, do you think some clever individual coined the establishment of an ICE detention camp in the Florida Everglades (with numerous torture allegations) as “Alligator Alcatraz” in 2025? It was branding, pure and simple–someone who understood Trump’s inherent attraction to famous names and terms he’s heard in films and popular culture capitalized on the fact that he would obviously love the cartoonish cruelty of the implication that escaped prisoners would be eaten by alligators. Heaven help us if he sees The Shawshank Redemption or The Green Mile again–keep the work of Frank Darabont away from him entirely, in fact.

It’s really no more complex than that in Trump’s mind–he loves that idea of reviving a tough-sounding name he’s seen in numerous, classic Hollywood films, while simultaneously displaying right-wing America’s trademark brand of media illiteracy in the way he fails to see that the prison is depicted in every one of those films as an abusive hellhole that no moral government would ever build or operate. Trump merely sees an abusive hellhole, and he thinks that replicating that abusive hellhole would somehow reflect well on him, because he surrounds himself with both sycophants and an empathy-devoid base of voters that frequently clap and cheer for the promise of abuse. Hell, he’s probably correct: His MAGA base would gladly torpedo a valuable, revenue-generating historical site to stick a modern prison on The Rock, if they thought the right people would be abused there.

The most likely outcome, of course, is that simply nothing happens with Alcatraz, even though cabinet members like Pam Bondi (or at least she was at the time!) and Doug Burgum have taken time out of their actual tasks to visit the island. We look forward to the federal government attempting to spend $152 million in 2027 to do something to the prison, only for Trump to (hopefully) lose interest after getting it in his head that we need to build an Azkaban for magical prisoners as well. Who knows where his attention will drift, depending on what is on TV?