Trump’s Tony Soprano Presidency Is Bleeding the Country Dry

In the summer of 2016, Vanity Fair published the article “How Tony Soprano paved the way for Donald Trump”, which claims that the protagonist of the famous TV series The Sopranos explains the appeal of Donald Trump. The article is written with a blasé air, as if to say, “Trump may be a charming sociopath like Tony Soprano, but it’s not like he’s ever going to be president.” »

It’s time to update the parallel for 2025. During Trump’s first term, capricious advisers dissuaded him from ideas like shooting protesters or sending in the armed forces to seize voting machines. This time, there are no guardrails, and Tony Soprano’s presidency has reached an inevitable plot point: the “exit.” A breakout is when the mob takes over a business owned by a civilian in debt, bleeds its resources, bankrupts it, and then perhaps burns it for the insurance money. This entire country is now David Scatino’s sporting goods store in Paramus, New Jersey, a once-thriving place consumed from within for the benefit of a corrupt few.

The fundamental moral question of the show is whether the audience should to want to save Tony, a sociopathic but charismatic mid-level mob boss, from depression, panic attacks, and the emotional torment of an ugly childhood. And yet, as with so much mob-related entertainment, and much to the misfortune of creator David Chase, viewers seemed to care more about the adrenalized violence than the ethical dilemma of a psychiatrist helping a melancholic murderer become a better gangster. No matter how repellent Chase was towards Tony and no matter how contemptuous Chase was expressed through the show towards his audience (which led to the cruelest final stunt in the history of the medium), people watched as Tony killed people with his bare hands and treated people, especially women and black people, like trash. Chase was trying to comment on misogyny and racism, but he was also using his ear for dialogue to make it appealing to an audience who wanted to be entertained with brilliantly presented blockbuster jobs, creative ethnic slurs, and the silicone implants of the mafia strip club, the Bada Bing.

It’s also fascinating to see how Sopranos the actors were among the first famous Trump supporters in 2016. Matteo’s Drea, whose Adriana was the nicest character on the show and was executed when she was called ac—-, justified her support for Trump by claiming in 2024 — and makes me skeptical — that her privileged children were “not allowed to go anywhere because of how bad crime is right now.” She has now, true to her idea, turned that into a MAGA celebrity: a market-corrected Scott Baio. If Chase looked at his audience with contempt, his heart must break when he sees how his actors also bought into the bastard archetype he spent years using them to criticize.

Trump, who values ​​loyalty and servitude above all, does not even claim to be the steward of a country of 330 million people. He is a mafia boss who pardons and commutes the sentences of criminals who have lined their pockets or who have sworn loyalty. He is an extortionist who honors billionaires who give him hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for presidential favors. He’s a thug who uses the Department of Justice, ICE, and the military to wage war on cities that voted against him. It is to kiss the ring or feel the wrath of punishment. He is now demanding $230 million of our money to compensate him for his past legal battles. His openly amoral personal lawyers, who run the Justice Department, are responsible for deciding whether he will get this payment. The potential $230 million seizure is a classic “bankruptcy”: absorbing a legitimate business of its assets (in this case, the U.S. Treasury) and then, once all the value has been extracted, setting it on fire (or in Trump’s case, demolishing the East Wing).

Some Trump defenders admit he is corrupt but discount it, saying every president has been an unsavory scoundrel and at least Trump is open about it. There is an air of truth to this: running this empire guarantees the commission of war crimes and your strings being pulled by the billionaire class.

But the Trump regime is different. This is a purely authoritarian operation, and almost every Republican bowed the knee to a demented and frustrated strongman who yearned for martial law – while he was paving the White House Rose Garden and building his ballroom bunker.

In fact, Trump is so disgusting that he makes me want to defend our friend Tony. At least Tony had nothing to do with Epstein’s Pederast Island. At least Tony got his hands dirty sometimes. At least Tony knew a good plate of food and didn’t eat steak covered in ketchup. And yet, as Sopranos/ addicted to mob movies, I realize I’m falling into the TV version of the same vortex the right is caught in: the moral relativism that says, “Tony may be a garbage man, but I’m entertained, so who really cares?”

We all see the big lie that Donald Trump is still trying hard to make us believe: that the 2020 election was rigged and that the now-forgiven mob of bloodthirsty clowns and would-be cabinet members who attempted to sack the Capitol were freedom fighters. There is, however, another lie: he claims that he is some sort of peacemaker; he is working overtime to present himself as a future Nobel laureate and great leader instead of a thug elevated to the highest office whose only talent is removing the meat from the bones of what remains of a functioning government. He demands that his subordinates treat him like Cicero instead of the sordid and wronged criminal he always was.

One of the great jokes The Sopranos is that Tony did not view himself as a murderous parasite, but rather saw himself as a military general or “captain of industry.” Trump has similar delusions that he is something more than what he is: a manifestation of the worst of us and, to quote the title of the latest Sopranos episode – “Made in America”.

Chase has rarely spoken about the Tony-Trump connection, but he did so in 2019 to The New York Times. “When the TV news talks about Trump,” he said, “they’ll say it’s like The Sopranos. People, including your own newspaper, use The Sopranos as an example of dishonesty and guilt. I don’t watch a lot of TV shows. Unfortunately, I spend my time watching CNN, Fox and MSNBC. So I get good and depressed and angry.”

“Getting Good, Depressed, and Angry”: Somehow, it’s comforting to know that Chase is just like the rest of us. But Chase is also guilty — at least in the first three seasons, before he lashed out at his own audience — of pandering to us with the sex, insults, and violence he sought to criticize. And boy was it fun. The Sopranos Has low art – a gangster comedy-drama – reached artistic heights.

Perhaps Chase, a previously limitedly successful television writer The Sopranoswas able to see in 1999 that this country was ready to adopt the archetype of the charming sociopath. Maybe he just stumbled upon it and unintentionally changed the history of Hollywood and politics. Regardless, the charming sociopath escaped the confines of fiction and, from what was once the White House, engaged in the ultimate “bankruptcy”: selling the country in parts while pouring gasoline and lighting a match.