The Sopranos Presidency
By 
Dave Zirin has an interesting essay that not only revisits the commonly held comparisons between The Sopranos and Donald Trump, but goes quite a bit deeper into the issue, including noting how not only did no one seem to get what David Chase was doing in the show, but that this includes a lot of actors in the show who have become hard core Trumpers at rates a lot higher than actors generally.
Tony Soprano Paved the Way for Donald Trump,” which argues that the protagonist of the lauded television series The Sopranos explains the allure 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. In the first Trump term, skittish advisers nudged him away from ideas like shooting protesters or sending in the armed forces to seize voting machines. This time, there are no guardrails, and the Tony Soprano presidency has reached an inevitable plot point: the “bust out.” A bust out is when the mob seizes a business from an indebted civilian, bleeds its resources, bankrupts it, and then maybe burns it down for the insurance money. This entire country is now David Scatino’s sporting goods store in Paramus, New Jersey—a once-thriving place being consumed from the inside for the benefit of a corrupt few.
The fundamental moral question of the show is whether the audience should want to save Tony, a sociopathic but charismatic mid-level mob boss, from depression, panic attacks, and the emotional torment of a lousy childhood. And yet, as with so much Mafia-related entertainment, and much to creator David Chase’s agony, viewers seemed to care more about the adrenalized violence than the ethical dilemma of a psychiatrist helping a melancholy murderer become a better mobster. No matter how repellent Chase made Tony and no matter how much contempt Chase expressed through the show toward his audience (leading to the cruelest last shot in the history of the medium), people tuned in to watch Tony kill people with his bare hands and treat people—especially women and Black people—like trash. Chase was trying to comment on misogyny and racism, but he also used his ear for dialogue to make it appealing to an audience that wanted to be entertained by slickly presented hit jobs, creative ethnic slurs, and the silicone implants at the mob strip club, the Bada Bing.
It’s also fascinating how many Sopranos actors were some of the first celeb Trump supporters back in 2016. Drea de Matteo, whose Adriana was the kindest hearted character on the show and was executed while being called a c—-, justified supporting Trump by claiming in 2024—and color me skeptical—that her privileged kids were “not allowed to go anywhere because of how bad crime is right now.” She has now, true to the grift, parlayed this into becoming a MAGA celebrity: a market-corrected Scott Baio. If Chase looked at his audience with contempt, his heart must break when he sees how thoroughly much of his cast also bought into the scumbag archetype he spent years using them to critique.
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Trump is, in fact, so repugnant, it makes me want to defend our friend Tony. At least Tony had nothing to do with Epstein’s island of pederasts. At least Tony occasionally got his hands dirty. At least Tony knew a good plate of food and didn’t eat ketchup-covered steak. And yet as a Sopranos/mob-film junkie, I realize I’m falling into the TV version of the same vortex that the right is caught in: the moral relativism that says, “Tony may be a garbage person, but I’m entertained—so who really cares?”
Whole thing is worth your time.