Ever wonder where Donald Trump gets his policy ideas? Take, for example, the presidential proclamation he fired off Sunday night on Truth Social, ordering the Bureau of Prisons to reopen and expand Alcatraz to house “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
Where, oh where, could that have come from?
It’s not like anyone’s seriously floated reopening The Rock since it shut down in 1963 and became a fog-shrouded tourist attraction run by the National Park Service. At least not until Trump somehow, seemingly out of nowhere, came up with the notion on Sunday night.
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We think we know what happened.
Last weekend, WLRN — a PBS affiliate that services South Florida, including Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago — aired a rerun of Escape From Alcatraz, Clint Eastwood’s 1979 classic about the prison’s most famous breakout. In fact, it aired it not once, but twice: Saturday night, then again Sunday morning — just hours before Trump took to social media and floated his plan to turn the historic island back into a high-security fortress.
“For too long,” he wrote in his post, “America has been plagued by vicious, violent and repeat Criminal Offenders, the dregs of society, who will never contribute anything other than Misery and Suffering. When we were a more serious Nation, in times past, we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm … That is why, today, 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.”
The White House declined to comment on whether Trump’s Alcatraz idea came straight from watching Escape From Alcatraz. But if true, we probably buried the real lede here, which is that the president was watching the movie on a PBS channel — the very network he routinely slams as “radical, woke propaganda.”
