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Donald Trump randomly decided to reopen Alcatraz just hours after PBS aired Escape From Alcatraz in the Mar-a-Lago region, which feels too on the nose to be a coincidence
It is a banner year for dumb headlines, as it looks like Trump is getting his policy ideas from watching old Clint Eastwood movies on TV.
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We can all agree that 2025 has been a weird year so far. While we aren’t a political website, we’ve been forced to cover more of Donald Trump’s second term as President than we would like simply because his policies have had a constant impact on pop culture at large. However, it now appears that pop culture has impacted Trump’s policies, with the President’s recent announcement that he is reopening Alcatraz prison looking more and more a result of him spending the weekend watching an old Clint Eastwood movie on PBS.
That’s right – there is mounting evidence that Trump’s sudden fixation with Alcatraz prison, which was shut down in 1963, came from his well-known love for spending hours watching TV. See, WLRN, a PBS affiliate that services the Mar-a-Lago area, aired Escape from Alcatraz, the famous 1979 Clint Eastwood movie about the most famous escape from the island prison twice over the weekend, including just hours before Trump once again announced policy changes via social media.
There has been no official confirmation from the White House that Trump decided to re-open Alcatraz prison – which, again, has been nothing but a tourist trap for more than 60 years – after watching Escape from Alcatraz on TV, but the timing seems to line up a little too nicely for it to be just a coincidence. Considering how his surface-level understanding of tariffs is already causing chaos in the tabletop and video game industries, we should just be glad that he watched a Clint Eastwood movie. He could have watched Pacific Rim and begun pouring money into the kaiju-fighting mech industry.
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