President Trump’s problems are threatening to engulf him. He has torpedoed the U.S. economy by starting a war he seems unable to end. Gas prices are stratospheric. His approval ratings are underwater. And his party’s governing trifecta is set to be washed away at the midterms.

Last week, he coped by claiming to be an agent of God, posting an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus — only for Christians to cry blasphemy and for him to cave, delete the post, and then lie that the image was supposed to be him as a “doctor.”

Whatever the medium — weird AI art, bomb threats, beefing with the pope — the implication of Trump’s spiraling is clear: He is grasping for the appearance of control.

For insecure societies and leaders, this is an old pursuit. (Machiavelli warned his young prince that to be powerful, it is more important to seem than to be.) And Trump is susceptible to a particular way of creating this appearance: monuments. He loves (border) walls. He loves (hotel) buildings. He loves (Confederate) statues. He really loves (gold-plated) sculptures (of himself). But like any stuck-in-the-’80s “tough on crime” fantasist worth his salt, Trump is especially giddy at the idea of a big, bad prison. A place whose very name strikes fear in the hearts of transgressors. A literal container for society’s problems.

Trump is mesmerized, in other words, by the fantasy of a super jail.

That is why, of all the president’s flailing fantasies of power, few encapsulate him better than his idea to reopen Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Trump asked Congress this month for $152 million of the 2027 budget to bring it online — a sign of his “commitment,” his proposal read, to resurrect it as “a state-of-the-art secure prison.”

He will, in all likelihood, fail. Alcatraz has been closed since 1963. The funds Trump is........

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