The clown show continues today with the Trump administration waving its hands in the direction of Alcatraz in an attempt to distract the more distractable members of the public from all the terrible shit they're doing.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum were up bright and early Thursday getting a private tour of Alcatraz before any tourists showed up. As the Chronicle reports via a spokesperson for House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi — who is in Washington today because Congress is in session — Bondi and Burgum were also expected to make a visit to the Presidio.

But where will they be having lunch?

It's not clear if Bondi is going to make some sort of public announcement about Trump's asinine idea for reopening Alcatraz as some sort of symbol of restored law and order, and stocking the Bay waters around it with sharks — which he claims are featured in a rendering he had drawn up. Because he's a child.

At 10 am Thursday, Burgum posted photos of the visit to Xitter, saying, "Spent the day on Alcatraz Island, a @NatlParkService site, to start the work to renovate and reopen the site to house the most dangerous criminals and illegals." Burgum added, "This administration is restoring safety, justice, and order to our streets."

Update: Bondi posted her own photos around 11 am, saying, "A great morning at Alcatraz... Under President Trump, we are Making America Safe Again."

Governor Gavin Newsom put out a statement saying, "Pam Bondi will reopen Alcatraz the same day Trump lets her release the Epstein files. So... never."

Pelosi was characteristically dismissive Wednesday when she issued a statement about Bondi's planned visit and the president's continued focus on the highly impractical and wildly expensive plan to make Alcatraz a great prison again.

"The planned announcement to reopen Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary is the Trump Administration’s stupidest initiative yet," Pelosi said. "It should concern us all that clearly the only intellectual resources the Administration has drawn upon for this foolish notion are decades-old fictional Hollywood movies."

The decades-old movie Pelosi was referring to was 1979's Escape From Alcatraz starring Clint Eastwood, which the Hollywood Reporter noted was playing on the local PBS affliate in Palm Beach, Florida when Trump was at Mar a Lago the May weekend he first posted his idea about reopening the prison to Truth Social.

Out of nowhere that Sunday he announced that he was going to be directing "the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders."

Ironically, the Eastwood movie depicts the true story of a 1962 escape from the prison that may have actually been successful. Hardened criminal Frank Morris and two other men concocted a plan to use an improvised raft to cross the Bay after escaping their cells, and they were never seen again and their bodies were never found.

Any process of reopening Alcatraz would require new electric, water, and plumbing infrastructure on the island, not to mention extraordinarily high operating costs that were ultimately the reason that the prison was closed in 1963. As a tourist attraction, Alcatraz generates around $60 million annually for the National Park Service.

Pelosi has added, regarding Trump's apparent plans, "It remains to be seen how the Administration could possibly afford to spend billions to convert and maintain Alcatraz as a prison when they are already adding trillions of dollars to the national debt with their sinful law." And, the former Speaker added, "Should reason not prevail and Republicans bring this absurdity before Congress, Democrats will use every parliamentary and budgetary tactic available to stop this lunacy."

Longtime local newspaper columnist and now ABC 7 politics "Insider" Phil Matier calls Bondi's visit "a photo op" and "a publicity stunt."

"This is a tour in order to capture the image of them in San Francisco on Alcatraz, declaring that Donald Trump is tough on crime, so tough that he's going to reopen The Rock," Matier says. He adds that while the expense of returning this "ancient castle" to a working prison is likely unworkable, "planning for it and showing drawings and making a statement about it, that's a lot cheaper."

The photo op is reminiscent of one the administration orchestrated last week, in which a group of federal officials on horseback rode through a Los Angeles park, making a threatening show of hunting for undocumented immigrants that was basically staged for Fox News's cameras.

Meanwhile, Bondi has spent the last week dodging questions about the Epstein files, as a host of formerly Trump-supporting voices on the internet are growing increasingly incensed about the administration trying to brush Trump's well established links to Epstein under the rug.

Previously: Trump Still Barreling Forward With Certifiably Insane Plan to Reopen Alcatraz as a Prison

Top image: U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a news conference at the DEA headquarters on July 15, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. The Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration held a news conference to announce that 71 kilograms of fentanyl and 20 kilograms of methamphetamine were seized in South Carolina as part of the “Operation Take Back America” initiative. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)