A funny thing happens when you type “Alcatraz Island” into a search engine. The first thing that comes up is a link to the U.S. National Park Service. There you can learn that the island is a National Historic Landmark.

Alcatraz has a many-layered history: Civil War fortress, military prison, federal prison, bird sanctuary, first lighthouse on the West Coast, and the birthplace of the American Indian Red Power movement: These are just a few of the fascinating stories of the Rock. Alcatraz Island is a designated National Historic Landmark for its significant contribution to the nation’s history.

It hasn’t been a federal prison since 1963. Ironically, it was the father of our current Secretary of Health & Human Services, Attorney General Robert F Kennedy, who signed off on closing Alcatraz down. I say this is ironic because President Donald Trump announced over the weekend that he wants to re-institute Alcatraz as a federal prison.

His reasoning is much the same as those who opposed the closing of Alcatraz in 1963, including House Appropriations Committee chairman Clarence Cannon who felt that we needed a frightening “Devil’s Island” style of prison to deter crime. But there were good reason to close it. For one, it cost more than three times as much per prisoner as other high security federal prisons. For another, it had fallen into disrepair in part due to the corrosive effects of the surrounding saltwater.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon had the National Park Service purchase Alcatraz “along with Fort Mason from the U.S. Army to establish the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.” It attracts over one million visitors per year. But it is still expensive to maintain. In recent years, the National Park Service had to stabilize the slope near the Warden’s House as well as the outer cell house walls.

The island has a lot of significance for Native Americans. For nearly two years, beginning in 1969, the island was occupied by Native Americans protesting federal policies towards indigenous people. Today, visitors to the island can “participate in a variety of presentations, workshops, demonstrations, and activities led by former occupiers and Indigenous groups.”

Nonetheless, the fascist regime is rapidly moving ahead with Trump’s plan:

On Monday, the US Bureau of Prisons Director William K. Marshall III said his agency will “pursue all avenues” to implement Trump’s plans for reopening Alcatraz.

“I have ordered an immediate assessment to determine our needs and the next steps. USP Alcatraz has a rich history. We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice. We will be actively working with our law enforcement and other federal partners to reinstate this very important mission,” Marshall said in a statement.

The first thing the regime will need to do is have the Secretary of the Interior reverse the island’s designation as an historic landmark by asserting that “the qualities for which it was originally designated have been lost or destroyed.” So, Trump’s project “to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders” will necessarily begin with a lie.

But it also doesn’t make sense, at least if you listen to the reason Trump provided for why he wants to do it.

The president told reporters as he arrived back to the White House later Sunday that it was “just an idea” he had because of “radicalized judges” who want to ensure migrants being deported have due process.

“I guess because so many of these radicalized judges, they want to have trials for … every single person that’s in our country illegally,” he said, adding, “that would mean millions of trials.”

Trump said Alcatraz has been “a sad symbol, but it’s a symbol of law and order. And you know it’s got quite a history, frankly, so I think we’re going to do that.”

Keep in mind that during it’s time as a federal prison, Alcatraz “averaged a prison population of about 260 to 275 prisoners at any given time – less than 1% of the total federal jail population.” Even if the prison structure is “substantially enlarged,” the geography of the rocky and sloped 22-acre island is such that its prison population cannot be increased by much. It certainly cannot offer any meaningful relief for the need to house “millions” of people pending trial for deportation.

I don’t know how frustration with the requirement that Trump follow the U.S. Constitution’s due process requirements led him to the “idea” that reopening Alcatraz will be a remedy or some kind of pushback against “radicalized judges.” Only someone with a broken brain can make these logical leaps.

Now, it’s true that Alcatraz can be considered a prototype for the sole Supermax prison we use today for “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders,” but the ADX Florence prison in Colorado only houses about 350 prisoners. And it’s not intended for people awaiting deportation trials: “The majority of current inmates…have been placed there because each has an extensive history in other prisons of committing violent crimes, including murder, against corrections officers and fellow inmates.”

The rest of the inmates are primarily convicted of some kind of terrorism.

In any case, there are undoubtedly innumerable 22-acre rocks off the coasts of America that can be repurposed as prisons without having to remove them from the Landmark registry or the U.S. Park Service. None of them, however, would be suitable or practical for fulfilling Trump’s stated goals for Alcatraz.

The man is an idiot.