Donald Trump Wants to Reopen Alcatraz — After Watching ‘Escape from Alcatraz’ on TV

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Have you ever pondered about where Donald Trump gets his policy suggestions? For instance, consider the presidential decree he posted on Truth Social on Sunday night, directing the Bureau of Prisons to revive and enlarge Alcatraz to accommodate “the country’s most merciless and violent offenders.

Where, oh where, could that have come from?

Since The Rock closed in 1963 and has since been transformed into a misty tourist site managed by the National Park Service, there hadn’t been any serious discussions about reopening it… until Trump unexpectedly proposed the idea on Sunday evening.

We think we know what happened.

Over the weekend, I caught a re-run of the 1979 film “Escape from Alcatraz,” starring Clint Eastwood, on our local PBS station in South Florida, which covers areas like Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago. Interestingly enough, they played it not just once but twice – first on Saturday evening, then again early Sunday morning. Coincidentally, this was mere hours before Trump proposed revamping Alcatraz back into a high-security prison.

In his post, he expressed that America has been struggling for too long with persistent violent criminals who are harmful dregs of society. These individuals bring nothing but misery and suffering, and in past times when the nation was more serious, we wouldn’t hesitate to confine the most dangerous ones away from harm’s reach. With this thought in mind, he is now instructing the Bureau of Prisons, along with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a significantly expanded and renovated Alcatraz.

It’s not clear if Trump’s concept about Alcatraz originated from watching the film “Escape from Alcatraz.” The White House chose not to discuss this possibility. However, if it’s true, we might have overlooked a significant detail in our initial report – that the President was actually watching the movie on a PBS channel. This is rather intriguing given his frequent criticisms of PBS as “radical” and “propaganda.

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2025-05-06 02:24