“The Rock” Made Him Do It: Trump’s Alcatraz Fantasy and the Real Assault on Our Parks
Presidential policy shaped by late-night Nicolas Cage movies, is not just ridiculous, it’s dangerous.
Sometime after midnight, Donald Trump sat alone in a gold-plated recliner, surrounded by half-eaten Filet-O-Fish wrappers and the glow of a flat-screen TV. On screen: The Rock, that Michael Bay classic where Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery save San Francisco from a chemical weapons attack launched from, yes, Alcatraz.
Now, I’m just speculating that watching a movie motivated Trump’s latest federal brainwave, but the timeline fits. And just like that, we have a new initiative.
By morning, Trump was calling Alcatraz “strong and miserable and beautiful and horrible,” which sounds less like a policy proposal and more like a line cut from Hamlet for being too incoherent. That didn’t stop him from proposing to reopen the infamous island prison, last shuttered in 1963 for being wildly inefficient, unsustainable, and absurdly expensive.
Here’s the part his supporters won’t tweet: Alcatraz cost three times more to run than a typical federal prison. It has no fresh water, everything has to be barged in, and it’s falling apart. Meanwhile, as a national park, Alcatraz brings in $60 million a year, revenue that helps keep other parks across the country open and operating. Turning it back into a prison wouldn’t just waste taxpayer money, it would gut one of the Park Service’s most valuable assets to build a monument to performative cruelty.
But Trump doesn’t care about that. This isn’t about safety or justice. It’s about staging his personal action movie. It’s a campaign poster wrapped in barbed wire. And it fits a broader pattern: while he toys with prison cosplay, his administration is actively dismantling the Park Service, laying off rangers, slashing maintenance budgets, and preparing to privatize or offload public lands into state or corporate hands. So while he fantasizes about being Sean Connery, America’s public lands get quietly looted.
Alcatraz is a metaphor for authoritarian fantasy, and now, possibly, the staging ground for a real-life dumping ground for those Trump deems enemies of the state.
And all because he may have watched The Rock.
While it's painfully obvious that Alcatraz would be a horrible site for a prison, I think you're missing the real reason for saying ridiculous things like what this President just puked up.
This is a distraction. It fills up blogs, TV broadcasts, and every other media. That makes it much more difficult to focus on the truly evil things this President is doing.
I strongly believe the right answer to this sort of distraction is to ignore it. Focus on what matters, unless one needs a chuckle to stay balance in this era of absurd incompetence.
Someone needs to get him to watch “Downfall.”