This week saw the announcement that our nation’s capital, Washington D.C. will host the 2027 NFL Draft. The event will be staged on the National Mall. President Trump welcomed NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to the White House yesterday, for a press briefing on the big event.
However, anything and everything that was said about the actual draft got overshadowed by the POTUS’ extremely bizarre rant about Alcatraz, the former prison which is both a national park and a top tourist attraction in San Francisco.
Trump has been expressing, anywhere that people will listen, his desire to re-open the notorious prison that famously closed in 1963 because it was deemed too costly to maintain.
The very conservative-leaning National Review transcribed the Alcatraz rant that Trump made while standing next to Goodell:
It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz, Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies, but uh, it’s right now a museum, believe it or not. A lot of people go there. It has the most violent criminals in the world. And nobody ever escaped.
One person almost got there, but they, as you know, the story, they found his clothing rather badly ripped up and — uh — it was a lot of shark bites, a lot of, a lot of problems. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something strong having to do with law and order.
We need law and order in this country and so we’re going to look at it, some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that and we had a little conversation. I think it’s going to be very interesting.
You can see the video of this strange meandering around the 13:30 mark of the YouTube clip here. Around the 14:25 mark, POTUS47 makes the weirdest remark of his entire spiel: “Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that.”
With the NFL commissioner directly to Trump’s right, at the moment he made that remark, it means…Goodell will be involved?
He’ll have a new gig in law enforcement at the Federal level? Huh? Que?
The best part of that YouTube clip is seeing both Goodell and Bowser make “Jim Halpert from The Office” face while Trump is talking.
The non-sensical idea of re-opening Alcatraz has already been widely discredited in the mass media, so there is no need to get into that stuff right now, but the obvious joke writes itself here:
Your 2028 NFL Draft host city will be San Francisco, with the main stage set up on Alcatraz Island.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He currently contributes to USA Today’s NFL Wires Network. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Post and ESPN. You can follow him on Linked In and Twitter