Prisoner of Trump's World

Alcatraz, 2006

Its prison closed in 1963, and Alcatraz has since become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the Bay Area.

Visitors can wander through the Gardens of Alcatraz, peruse the Big Lockup Exhibit, or take a night tour where one can “enjoy the beauty of a sunset silhouetting the Golden Gate Bridge” as well as “experience a cell door demonstration.” Over the years, Boy Scouts have clamored to hold overnight campouts in the infamous isolation cells of D Block. Athletes compete in prison-themed events, including a canoe race circling the island and the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon.

Donald Trump demonstrated the power of the Presidency's "bully pulpit" when he called for the Alcatraz prison to be rebuilt and re-opened.

Calling the prison a “symbol of law and order,” Trump on Sunday said he is directing the Bureau of Prisons and other federal agencies to rebuild Alcatraz to house “America’s most ruthless and violent offenders.”

However, the reasons for its original closure haven't gone away.

It operated as a maximum-security facility for nearly three decades, closing in 1963 because of millions of dollars in needed repairs and the expense of hauling all supplies, including fresh water, to the facility by boat. Alcatraz was tiny by the standards of most federal facilities, never housing more than around 275 prisoners.

President Trump is too much of a cost-benefit realist to take his own proposal seriously. IMHO, he did it to provoke Democrats and direct their attention from his other policies. [bold added]

Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco...call[ed] the president’s idea “unhinged and terrifying.” Trump wants to turn Alcatraz “into a domestic gulag in the middle of San Francisco Bay,” Wiener wrote on social media.

Some Democratic strategists recognize the President's maneuver as a distraction. [bold added]

But Trump’s Sunday evening social media post about the idea follows a well-honed strategy that the president has been deploying for years. He makes outlandish claims and goads the media into writing stories debunking or criticizing them, which focuses the national conversation around his preferred topics.

Centering the news cycle around the idea that he wants to crack down on crime could keep Americans’ focus on an issue that’s politically advantageous to him, experts say.

“He picks outlandish topics that he thinks will be popular with the general public, but unpopular with Democrats and maybe the educated Democratic elites, in the hopes that they criticize it,” said Gabriel Lenz, a political science professor at UC Berkeley. “That keeps an idea, an issue, a topic where he thinks he has an advantage in the news.”...

Longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon calls this strategy “flood the zone.” It’s how Trump grows his popularity among everyday Americans, Bannon says.

"Flooding the zone" is a term that originated in sports. For example, if a team sends enough pass receivers to an area, it becomes impossible for the other team to cover each one.

Calls by wiser heads to ignore the Alcatraz distraction fall on deaf ears, because as Scott Wiener has demonstrated, some Democrats can't help themselves.