Alcatraz: A Communications and Policy Case Study

How the President speaks to his supporters, taunts his opponents, and sometimes, paves the way to counter-program

The President will be 79 years old in a couple of weeks. He’ll celebrate his birthday with a military parade in Washington. There will be tanks and soldiers, helicopters and horses. The parade will be a manifestation of what Donald Trump wants you to believe about him and what he wants you to believe about our country. He will be the center of attention, and the message — about him and the country — will be, unequivocally, might.

The President has been at the front of the national political stage for over ten years now. He had been a lesser, but still very well-known national public figure for decades before that. Like all performers who have enjoyed long careers, the President has his signature act. He employed it as a businessperson and TV star, and he does so now as president. The act is intended to manipulate our views about him — his brand — and control our reactions to him too. He is a master at it, and the parade is just part of the act.

Despite all of our exposure to him and the act over so many years, it seems we are — almost all of us — still so easily manipulated by him and how he communicates. His game is old, but it is still remarkably effective. With his social media postings, executive orders, White House statements, and rallies, he effortlessly makes his supporters gleeful, and at the same time and with the same ease, taunts and provokes his opponents.

When the President speaks, he is generally able to communicate his ideas, simple as they typically are, with remarkable effect. These ideas are often in service of his authoritarian nature. But beyond that, he communicates them in a way that shapes how those who hear him react. When he speaks, we invariably have an emotional and instinctive reaction. We love him or we hate him. But either way, he gets our attention, and he instigates us. We can’t seem to help it. And few political figures have deciphered how to effectively counter his way of communicating.

There have been many political analyses — one just last week was published in the New York Times — that show that the President has “remade America’s political landscape.” He has been gaining support among the American people for 12 years now. The Times’ analysis concludes that the “Democrats’ problems run deep,” and that is likely true. Some of it is the substantive positions the Democrats have taken. Some of it is Trump’s policy positions. But some of it — a lot of it, I think — is how the President communicates, how Democrats react to him, and what those reactions themselves communicate to the public.

Last month, in one small statement among the cacophony of statements coming from the White House, the President ordered several federal agencies to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz, the infamous federal penitentiary that closed in the 1960s and has since become a popular tourist destination. If you ever get a chance to take the ferry into the middle of San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz, it’s worth doing. On a nice day, it’s a beautiful boat ride, and on almost any day, it’s a fun and interesting trip.

When I worked for Chief Judge Robert Peckham of the Northern District of California, a distinguished, respected, and very wise man, in 1984, he sent us both to Alcatraz and, in a far more sobering experience, to San Quentin State Prison, the oldest prison in California, opened in 1854. Both prisons are on the Bay, San Quentin at the north end in Marin County. Judge Peckham wanted us to see the impact of what he and we were doing in our work, and in particular, he wanted us to see and meet the prisoners in San Quentin and to see the gas chamber there too, which was at that time still being used occasionally for executions.

In a post on social media, President Trump said that he directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and others to work together to reopen a “substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ.” He said it would house the country’s “most ruthless and violent” offenders.

For too long, 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’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Some of us thought the announcement was a joke. That’s part of the magic of Trump’s way. Bruce Springsteen, who has been in a bit of a feud lately with the President, has often described Asbury Park — the “boardwalk town” of his youth — as a place where everything is touched with “a tinge of fraud.” It’s part of the allure of the place, creating an ambiguity between what’s real and what’s imagined. Asbury Park is not the French Riviera. But the fraud allows us to morph in our minds what we see and experience into what we want to see and experience. Springsteen has readily acknowledged that fraud is part of his act too. “I wasn't any racecar drivin' rebel; I wasn't any corner street punk.” Springsteen is a guitar player with what he himself describes as a magic trick. And that trick is not all that distant from Trump’s and how he manipulates us.

The magic is in the ambiguity. What is truth? What is authentic? Trump is forever winking at all of us. He lives in a dream-like world pinned to his convictions that include never giving in and never giving up. If we strain and look hard, that world is tied — sometimes closely, sometimes not at all — to the real world around us. We are drawn to what he says in part because there’s something to figure out. What’s real and what’s not? The President’s opponents love to decode his statements and then prove to everyone how they’ve done it and how they find Trump to be an idiot.

So it was with the Alcatraz announcement. It was, first, catnip to the press. What a great visual. What a great story. Was it real? Where did the idea come from? The President’s opponents then fell for it too, as they do over and again for what he says. California Governor Gavin Newsom said, “I mean, you can't even come up with a more colossally bad fiscal idea. Nothing about this makes any sense.” State Senator Scott Weiner said, “This is truly a ridiculous proposal,” and called the idea “deeply unhinged.” They weren’t in on the joke.

Of course, President Trump was probably just being unrestrained, unable to control some idea that crossed his mind, perhaps after watching one of the Alcatraz movies. But he did communicate clearly and unambiguously to all that he is tough on crime and criminals and wants to protect the American people. His opponents, on the other hand, communicated that they have no respect for the President — and, by implication, at least for some, for his supporters, too — and also how smart they think they are, all of which will help the President with those supporters. The President needs to be despised to have those who back him love him.

Of course, none of this is new. In September 2016, Salena Zito, who was then covering the Trump campaign, wrote in a column for The Atlantic that the press and his opponents take Trump “literally, but not seriously;” and that his supporters take him “seriously, but not literally.” Nobody believes Donald Trump completely. We see and believe what we want to see and believe. While his opponents are fact checking and trying to calculate how much it will cost to renovate the prison on Alcatraz, or how to get water to the island, or how to find guards to serve there, the President has already made his simple points: my first job is to protect you; I’m going to put dangerous people away; and I’m in charge and thinking big.

And here’s the kicker, especially for those of us concerned with crime and sentencing policy — sending his message in a catchy, memorable, and unmistakable way gives the President the ability simultaneously to counter-program. This past week, that Alcatraz counter-programming, first, came in the form of him granting clemency to dozens of federal convicts. In February, Trump, in another symbolic and especially effective move, appointed Alice Marie Johnson — a woman whose life sentence for a drug offense he first commuted in 2018, at the behest of Kim Kardashian, and later pardoned completely in 2020 — as the first pardon czar. “You know, Alice was in prison for doing something that today probably wouldn’t even be prosecuted,” the President said during remarks to about 400 people during an event announcing Johnson’s appointment. “She spent 22 years in prison — 22 years. She had another 22 years left. Can you believe it?” “It should not have happened,” he added. “It should not have happened. So you’re going to look, and you’re going to make recommendations, and I’ll follow those recommendations.”

The President can communicate compassion and support for criminal justice reform when he wants to. Politically, his tough on crime rhetoric — including statements like the one on Alcatraz — enables it. That rhetoric set the stage for his astonishing record of commutations this past week and in these first few months of his Administration and for his record supporting the First Step Act in the first Administration too. Yes, his commutations are mostly of political allies and friends of his who committed fraud, money laundering, bribery, and tax crimes. But the political lesson — of simultaneously embracing public safety and justice reform with powerful symbols of both — should not be lost among the corruption.

This past week, in addition to the commutations, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) issued a press release announcing a directive from BOP Director William Marshall to expand the use of home confinement under the First Step Act. “The directive is rooted in the principle of smart, fair criminal justice reform—reform that began when President Donald J. Trump disrupted entrenched political paralysis and signed the FSA into law, delivering the most significant overhaul to the federal justice system in a generation.” The release went on —

“President Trump said he would fight for the forgotten men and women of this country, and the First Step Act proved he meant it,” said Director Marshall. “Now, we are ensuring that this reform continues to work—not just as a policy, but as a promise to Americans seeking redemption and a path forward.”

The release could have been written by the ACLU.

We have learned over the last several decades that it is possible to reduce incarceration and crime rates at the same time. We have seen that criminal justice reform can be a bipartisan issue. We have also been subject to the President’s acts of distraction and spectacle. Sometimes, the acts — and the way he communicates — are in furtherance of his authoritarian and corrupt instincts and must be fought. But sometimes too, now and then, a presidential statement — even one touched by a tinge or more of fraud — can be a case study we can learn from and that can help us as we try to promote reform and safety in a politically viable way.