Trump isn’t reopening Alcatraz. He’s pointing at the ruins and saying: this is what we’ll do to them.
It’s not a policy. It’s not even a plan. It’s a mood, a threat, a press shot. Pam Bondi standing in front of rusting bars, nodding at ghosts. No plumbing, no power, no budget. Just the theatre of punishment. The image does the work.
This is what the state does now, when it can’t govern: it performs. Alcatraz is perfect for that. An island. Isolated. Famous. Brutal. Doesn’t matter that it’s been closed for sixty years. Doesn’t matter that it can’t hold prisoners. It looks the part. That is enough, for now.
When the work dries up, punishment moves in to take its place. Always has. The state doesn’t build housing or hospitals. It builds fences and cells. The prison becomes the last functioning institution, the only one still hiring. And not just guards and contractors, but roles to cast: criminal, gang member, threat. That’s what’s left when capital no longer needs you. Not a job, but a performance. You are not meant to be lifted out of poverty. Just processed, displayed, and forgotten. The system doesn’t know how to care, only how to contain.
“It’s not about incarceration. It’s about domination.”
The country’s falling apart, so they resurrect symbols. A prison on a rock, ringed by sharks. Fortress America in miniature. They say it’s for violent criminals and migrants. It’s not. It’s for the cameras. For the administration. I’m not even sure the base buys this shit anymore. It’s for the fantasy that someone, somewhere, will still be made to pay.
They are not offering justice. They are offering vengeance. The system’s hollow, so all that’s left is retribution. When that’s not enough, spectacle fills the gap. A flag, a cell, a press release. Watch them walk through the ruin like it’s a film set. Because it is.
Alcatraz isn’t a prison. It is a film set. That’s what makes it so useful. It taps directly into the psyche of Trump, who has almost certainly never read a history of the place but has seen it on screen, The Rock, probably, not Birdman of Alcatraz. Explosions, escape, punishment, redemption. It’s prison as myth, as theatre, as action movie backdrop. That’s what he’s conjuring when he gestures at reopening it. Not a functioning carceral institution, but a set-piece. Something to stage vengeance on. Something that looks good in a trailer.
“The state doesn’t govern anymore. It gestures.”
Alcatraz was closed in 1963, under Kennedy. Shut down by RFK, who looked at the books and saw a leaking wreck that cost too much to run. It was a material decision, too expensive, too broken, too absurd to justify. Now Trump wants to reopen it, not because it works, but because it looks like it should. The liberal state shut it down as anachronism. The authoritarian one brings it back as fetish.
“The prison was closed for practical reasons. It’s being reopened for mythical ones.”
Like all myths, it hides something darker underneath. Because this isn’t just pageantry. While the cameras point at Alcatraz, planes keep flying out of Texas, Arizona, California. Moving detainees in secret, offshoring the dirty work. What we used to call rendition (extra-legal detention, unaccountable transfers, black sites) has been folded into domestic policy. You don’t need CIA contractors when you’ve got ICE, CBP, and a private prison industry with no public oversight. The spectacle is a cover. The cruelty is ongoing.
Is this really for the MAGA faithful? Those who wait for Trump, hour after hour, on baking airfields under a punishing sun, eyes fixed on the horizon for the moment his plane touches down, is it? Do they truly hate that much? Or is this really for Trump himself, for Miller, Bondi, Noem. For those in his administration who would have felt perfectly at home in another time, another place, where cruelty was a form of governance, where violence was staged for effect, where the camp was not a memory but a method? A place like Auschwitz.
“Alcatraz sells the image of control while people are being disappeared in real time.”
The Swamp Is Real
Trump doesn’t need Alcatraz to reopen because its logic is already alive. In the Florida swamps, in tents and chain-link, in what they are now calling Alligator Alcatraz. It’s the same fantasy, just stripped of the stone. A prison in the Everglades, surrounded by water and alligators, sold to the base as deterrent, vengeance, spectacle. The name is a joke. The conditions are not
This one they did build. Thrown up in weeks. Razor wire in a wildlife refuge. Mosquitoes thick in the air. Heat blistering the ground. Detaining thousands there, migrants, asylum seekers, a few alleged gang members, but mostly people who have committed no crime beyond existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
DeSantis calls it efficient. Trump calls it “smart.” Neither mentions the lawsuits. Or the tribal land they have bulldozed through. Or the fact that there’s no functioning sewage. But the administration loves it. Swamp punishment. Fortress America with a gator moat.
“Alligator Alcatraz is the myth made flesh. You don’t need a rock when you’ve got a swamp.”
What Alcatraz is in symbol, this place is in practice. The fantasy of isolation. The threat of nature turned into carceral theatre. The cruelty outsourced to heatstroke and insects and distance. They don’t even need to beat you if the landscape does it for them.
This is rendition by another name. The logic of the black site folded into domestic policy. No courts. No oversight. Just flights, fences, and fear. You won’t see it on the evening news unless the cameras are invited. Even then, it will be presented as necessity. Order. Strength.
So while Bondi walks through a ruin in San Francisco, selling nostalgia, the real operation is already running in Florida. That’s the dialectic: the image and the infrastructure. The ghost and the gator. One distracts. The other disappears.
The Prison Doesn’t Need to Open
Because it already has. Not on the rock, but in the wreckage of American law. In the staging of cruelty as leadership. In the conversion of punishment into brand.
Trump doesn’t govern. He stages. He threatens. He reenacts the past, badly, because there’s nothing left to offer in the present. Alcatraz is the promise. Alligator Alcatraz is the delivery.
The rest of us are just meant to watch.
