Always turned on by his most extreme ideas, Trump wants to reopen Alcatraz as a federal prison. He apparently got this twisted idea after watching Don Siegel’s 1979 film with Clint Eastwood, Escape from Alcatraz, one of the best prison movies ever made, a film with a deep sensitivity to those who live under confinement. Trump says he picked Alcatraz because it’s a prison no one’s ever escaped from, which is a pretty clear indication that he didn’t watch the Siegel/Eastwood flick, which documents the 1971 escape by three prisoners, Frank Morris and the brothers Clarence and John Anglin. (I doubt Trump has the attention span to watch any film that doesn’t include him.) In fact, there were 11 known escape attempts, five of which appear to have been successful.

But of course, preventing prison escapes is not the point of Trump’s theatrics. The point is to sound tough-to-the-point-of-sadistic while getting under the skin of California Government Gavin Newsom and San Francisco elites, for whom Alcatraz has........

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