MAGA America: Even If You Don’t Live In Florida, Alligator Alcatraz Is A Blueprint We’re Stuck With

Welcome To The Restoration of Misery… The GOP’s Suicide Pact With The Past

Alligator Alcatraz is popularized nickname for Blackwater River Correctional Facility in Florida's Everglades— and the conditions are genuinely appalling. The prison is run by the infamous GEO Group, one of the largest private prison corporations in the U.S., and, simply put, it exemplifies everything wrong with profit-driven incarceration.

Here’s a picture of life inside I got from south Florida congressional candidate Oliver Larkin:

• Maggots and worms in the food with meals often arriving moldy or undercooked... sometimes simply inedible.

• Sewage backups, with raw human waste pooling near bunks, are routine and go unrepaired for days or weeks.

• No access to phones, even for emergencies. Inmates, unconvicted of any crimes, are cut off from their families— punished with isolation for simply asking for humane treatment.

• Extreme solitary confinement and psychological abuse.

• Medical neglect so severe that prisoners with treatable illnesses go without care, sometimes leading to death.

And these conditions aren’t accidental— they’re the business model. GEO Group cuts costs wherever possible to pad profits, which means fewer guards, fewer nurses, worse food, no maintenance, and no oversight. The result is a brutal, dehumanizing environment that breaks people rather than rehabilitates them.

Now, to your real question: Is this what Trump voters— or DeSantis or GOP voters— wanted? This cruelty? The ones I know didn’t explicitly vote for worm-filled meals or overflowing toilets. But they did vote for the politics of punishment, privatization and dehumanization. And that choice has consequences. When Republicans promise to be “tough on crime,” they don’t mean better public safety or restorative justice. They mean more prisons, harsher sentences and— whether they know it or not— privatized punishment. DeSantis, like Trump, has cultivated a reputation for cruelty-as-policy— from his treatment of migrants to his war on public education. He’s backed GEO Group, taken campaign donations from them, and maintained the contracts that allow atrocities like Alligator Alcatraz to fester. So even if most Republican voters probably weren’t picturing maggots in food trays or inmates choking on the smell of sewage, they were voting for a worldview that values retribution over rehabilitation, profit over people, and spectacle over substance.

And at some point, that moral responsibility— of the voters, not just the elected officials— can’t be shrugged off. Because this— something more out of a dystopian novel than modern America— is what happens when cruelty is a feature, not a bug. It’s deliberate, structural and out in broad daylight, not just neglect or incompetence— a license to treat certain people as less than human. Republican voters cast their ballots for cruelty and Alligator Alcatraz is what cruelty looks like.

And that brings us to today’s question: who bears more blame: the voters who keep pulling the lever or the leaders like Trump and DeSantis and the conservative legislators who enable them and who’ve weaponized fear, resentment and lies to gain and hold power? I’ve come to think of those leaders as arsonists who know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve deliberately stoking white grievance, demonizing immigrants, trashing public institutions, making cruelty a litmus test for loyalty— not policy disputes, moral choices. These are people who looked at America’s most vulnerable and said, “Let’s make it worse for them” to lift ourselves further. They lie constantly; push propaganda; surround themselves with sycophants— and, these days, billionaires. They hollow out democracy while wrapping themselves in the flag. And they do it for power and profit, not belief. They’re the architects.

But, I’m sorry to say, the voters, our fellow citizens, are the engine. Without millions of people willing to buy into the delusion— or at least to tolerate the bigotry, corruption and authoritarianism— it wouldn't work. Trumpism isn’t a cult of one man; it’s a collective movement. Plenty of voters see the dysfunction, the division, the brutality… and enthusiastically vote for it anyway. They like how it makes them feel: powerful, vengeful, righteous. Many even know Trump isn’t a savior. But for them, he’s a middle finger to the people they’ve been told by Fox and Hate Talk Radio are their enemies.

That makes them complicit, very much so, even if the deeper failure lies with the transpartisan conservative political class which spent decades ignoring inequality, cozying up to corporate donors and letting civic education wither while feeding a steady diet of outrage and entertainment. They created a culture where facts are optional, cruelty is rewarded, and short-term gain trumps long-term vision.

You may have seem Peter Baker’s feature in yesterday’s NY Times, From Science To Diversity, Trump Hits The Reverse Button On Decades Of Change. Did his voters— or at least the ones who aren’t the self-identified MAGAts— decide to reverse decades of progress: erasing climate protections, dismantling civil service independence, turning the DOJ into a political weapon and centralizing power in the White House. Most of the time, Señor TACO wasn’t hiding any of this. He’s been promising an unapologetic return to “better times”— not for working people or the marginalized, but for white grievance politics, fossil fuel billionaires, religious reactionaries and strongman fantasies. Clearly, when voters cast their ballots for him, they weren’t voting for an economic miracle or even some outsider shaking up the system. They were voting for a restoration. A rollback. A revanchist vision of America where the arc of history doesn’t bend toward justice— it snaps back like a rubber band. And if you’re poor, sick, queer, brown, trans or just dependent on a functioning government, that vision isn’t nostalgic; it’s a threat. And the cruelty, chaos and even the corruption are not just collateral damage. Thank of it as part of the aesthetic, what they mean by “winning.”

Baker began with the introduction of fluoride into drinking water in 1945, the flu vaccine a year later and fuel efficiency standards for cars in 1975. “Such innovations,” wrote Baker, “long ago became stitched into the fabric of American life, largely accepted by most Americans who came to rely on them or gave them little thought. That is, until Trump and his team came along and began methodically rolling back widespread practices and dismantling long-established institutions. It should come as no surprise that Trump would try to undo much of what Biden did over the past four years. What is so striking in Trump’s second term is how much he is trying to undo changes that happened years and even decades before that. At times, it seems as if he is trying to repeal much of the 20th century. On matters big and small, Trump has hit the rewind button. At the broadest level, he has endeavored to reverse the globalization and internationalism that have defined U.S. leadership around the globe since World War II, under presidents of both parties. But even at a more prosaic level, it has become evident that Trump, 79, the oldest president ever inaugurated, simply prefers things the way he remembers them from his youth, or even before that.”

He has made clear that he wants to return to an era when Cats was at the big hit on Broadway, not Hamilton; when military facilities were named after [treasonous] Confederate generals, not gay rights leaders; when coal was king and there were no windmills; when straws were plastic, not paper; when toilets flushed more powerfully; when there weren’t so many immigrants; when police officers weren’t discouraged from being rough on suspects; when diversity was not a goal in hiring or college admissions or much of anything else.

Just last month, Trump suggested going back to calling the Pentagon chief the “secretary of war,” a title retired in 1947, rather than secretary of defense, a term he dismissed as “politically correct.” Just this month, he again talked about reopening Alcatraz, the famed island prison in San Francisco Bay that was closed in 1963. Just last weekend, he said the Washington Commanders football team should not have dropped the name Redskins, which it did in 2020 amid heightened awareness of racial sensitivities.

Trump suggests that he is on a mission to halt what he considers the degradation of America by “radical left lunatics” and return the country to better times. “We’ve seen some of our political system attempting to overthrow the timeless American principles and other pillars of our liberty, and replace them with some of the most noxious ideas in human history, ideas that have been proven false,” he said earlier this month. 

Trump’s shift into reverse gear reflects the broader sentiments of many Americans eager for a change in course. The United States has cycled from progressive to conservative eras throughout its history. The liberal period ushered in by Franklin D. Roosevelt eventually led to a swing back to the right under Ronald Reagan, which led to a move toward the center under Bill Clinton.

But Trump has supercharged the current swing. The influential writer William F Buckley, Jr. once defined a conservative as someone standing athwart history and yelling, “Stop!” Trump seems to be standing athwart history yelling, “Go back!”

Of course what that is, is the difference between mainstream political parties’ conservatism and fringe groups’— like MAGA— reactionary movements. In that way, Trump has more in common with Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Calhoun— not to mention Edmund Burke, French monarchist and philosopher of reactionary politics Joseph Maistre (or the U.S. 2020’s version, Curtis Yarvin) or odious historical characters like Metternich, Pope Pius IX, Tsar Nicholas I, Bismarck… and, of course the Know Nothing Party leaders of the mid-19th Century, than with Reagan, Goldwater, Buckley, Howard Taft, let alone Dole, Nixon, Romney, either George Bush, let alone Dwight Eisenhower, whose brought the GOP out of the decades-long wilderness and back into the political mainstream. Or well they all dreaming of counterrevolution and the Gilded Age all along, but just settling for halting the onslaught of the progressive project? If so, “Trump,” wrote Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus, “has outdone them all, because he understands liberalism is in retreat. He has pushed beyond Buckley’s ‘stop,’ and instead promises a full-throttle reversal.”

Baker notes that Señor Trumpanzee “has never clearly defined exactly when America was great, and when it stopped being great. What period of American history is he trying to recapture? The 1950s of his childhood, with its Leave It To Beaver era of peace and prosperity, even if women and people of color were still second-class citizens and Joseph McCarthy blacklisted supposed communists? The 1980s, when Trump was in his Manhattan real estate heyday, featured regularly in the tabloids as he squired models around? The early 2000s, when he was a fixture on reality television, barking, “You’re fired!” every week Or is he looking even further back, to an era before he was even alive? In recent months, the president has talked repeatedly about the Gilded Age as a halcyon period in American history, highlighting William McKinley (‘the Tariff King’) as his presidential model. ‘Our country was the wealthiest, proportionately the wealthiest, from 1870 to 1913, Trump said [incorrectly] at a cabinet meeting last week, suggesting a return to a time when tariffs were high and the income tax was yet to be enacted.

The wistfulness for a time before living memory, of course, is based on a selective reading of history. By traditional measures, most Americans are far better off now than they were in 1900, when typical workers made a fraction of today’s salaries, lived without running water, indoor plumbing, electricity or modern medicine, and could expect to live until just 47, or 33 if they were Black. Neither women nor people of color enjoyed full rights of citizenship, much less the chance to become one of those “greatest businessmen” figuring out how to spend all the money.

Tariffs, which went out of favor after the onset of the Great Depression, are the most prominent example of Trump’s efforts to return to a previous way of doing things. But he has moved to abolish many of the institutions and legal frameworks of the past century, calling them wasteful bureaucracies, impediments to growth or examples of liberal excess.

… Not every issue is personally important to Trump, but he has installed high-level officials whose views were for years not considered in the mainstream, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary. Trump has empowered them to reopen seemingly resolved questions like the safety of the flu vaccine and fluoride in water.

The retreat from faith in inoculations comes as measles cases have shot up to the highest level since the virus was declared eliminated in the United States, and as the Trump administration is proposing to cut federal fundin for basic scientific research  by a third.

While much of this was foreshadowed by Trump on the campaign trail, the speed and scope of the reversals in so many areas have nonetheless shocked many in the political, legal, scientific and cultural establishments, who now find themselves debating matters seemingly settled long ago.

“I never expected in my life that the huge advances made in terms of vaccines, respect for data in evaluating causes of diseases, tests and technologies would be discarded,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania who advised President Barack Obama on health care policy. “So much that was settled and is settled but being disregarded is worrisome.”

Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a Washington research institution, said Trump was tapping into a sense of unease among many Americans that the country had gone too far and too fast in some areas.

“He’s appealing to a widespread sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that the 1950s were simpler and better times, when the country was united, proud and optimistic in ways that it no longer is now,” said Kabaservice, the author of books on liberalism and conservatism.

“It’s a vision,” he added, “that all but erases the complexity of the era— McCarthyism, the rise of television, the nascent civil rights movement, fears of nuclear war, etc.— but correctly senses that working-class values and institutions— family, neighborhood, church, union— loomed much larger then than they do now.”

But if a vision of a simpler past appeals to him, even Trump is discovering that some of what he wants to roll back may have some value after all. Not that long ago, he had declared that he planned to “phase out” FEMA and return disaster response to the states. As he visited Texas on Friday to offer support following last weekend’s deadly floods, however, his advisers emphasized that he planned to reform the agency, not do away with it.

If Trump’s America is a restoration, it’s not of greatness; it’s of despair weaponized. Life expectancy plummeting, social trust shattered, public health in retreat and private prisons like Alligator Alcatraz overflowing with the targeted... this isn’t nostalgia as much as necropolitics— literally government by the management of who lives and who dies. And if enough voters are fine with that, maybe because they think it won’t be them next, then the sickness runs deeper than we ever imagined. Maybe that’s why Trump’s fans don’t mind a world where life expectancy stalls out at 47. Maybe, after decades of getting lied to, poisoned and discarded on the side of the road, they’ve just accepted misery as their birthright— so long as someone else suffers more. It turns out “Make America Great Again” was never a plan for the future. It was always resignation to the past— when life was cheap, cruelty was casual and the powerful never had to pretend to care. Alligator Alcatraz isn’t an aberration. It’s the blueprint for Make America Rot Again.