There’s an unfortunate pattern that has come to define Republican politics in the Trump era: The president will come up with a foolish idea; he’ll present the idea to the public as if it were brilliant; and it falls on GOP officials to quickly pretend that the emperor with no clothes is fully dressed.

Donald Trump thinks it’s time to rename the Gulf of Mexico? Republicans who never had the slightest interest in the body of water scrambled to follow the president’s lead. Trump wants to acquire Greenland? Republicans who were indifferent toward the island quickly insisted that Greenland be added to the United States.

With Alcatraz, the pattern is predictably intact.

A couple of days ago, for reasons unknown, the president said he was directing a series of federal agencies to begin work on reopening Alcatraz — not as a national park that’s popular with tourists, but as a working prison. Indeed, in Trump’s vision, Alcatraz won’t just be rebuilt, it will also be “substantially enlarged” for incoming inmates.

Even by Trump standards, this was, and remains, a bizarre idea. It’s unnecessary, impractical, inefficient and spectacularly expensive in equal measure. The likelihood of officials actually implementing such an absurdity is effectively zero. The San Francisco Chronicle published a good report on this:

John Martini, an expert on Alcatraz history who served as a park ranger on the island in the 1970s, shortly after it opened to tourism, told the Chronicle that it would be impossible to reopen the cellblock because the building is “totally inoperable,” with no water or sewage, and electricity only in certain parts. “It was falling apart and needed huge amounts of reconstruction, and that would have only brought it up to 1963 code,” Martini said. “It was always an extremely expensive place to run.”

The same report went on to note that, according to the federal Bureau of Prisons, Alcatraz was nearly three times as expensive as other U.S. prisons to run, due largely to the fact that food, water and fuel had to arrive by boat.

“If the discussion is to rebuild the prison building to hold people, I don’t think that would be feasible,” Martini added. “It would have to be torn down and rebuilt.”

And yet, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared on Fox Business the day after the president pitched the idea and said she supports reopening Alcatraz as a prison — in part because of the “cost savings.”

That was laughable, of course, but Bondi was hardly alone. A variety of GOP lawmakers, from the House and Senate, quickly threw their support behind the nonsensical proposal. Officials from the White House and administration soon followed, appearing on camera to tout the Alcatraz idea as if it were a serious and credible plan.

The director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons said he has begun exploring the next possible steps to comply with the president’s ridiculous directive.

For his part, the president was asked how he came up with this. As part of a long, rambling answer in which he claimed he was “supposed to be a moviemaker,” Trump eventually told reporters: “It sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. It’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting.”

Or put another way, the president can’t even speak about his own proposal in a coherent way.

I don’t care that Trump presented a dumb idea that will almost certainly never come to fruition. I do care that much of his party is playing along, placating the president as if he were an intemperate toddler, blurring the line between policymaking and misguided fantasy.