In summer 2016, Vanity Fair published the article, “How 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, who values loyalty and servitude above all, doesn’t even pretend to be the steward of a country of 330 million people. He’s a mob boss who pardons and commutes the sentences of criminals who have either lined his pockets or sworn cringey loyalty. He’s an extortionist who showers honors on billionaires who give him hundreds of millions of dollars in return for presidential favors. He’s a thug who uses the Justice Department, ICE, and the military to wage war against the cities that voted against him. It’s kiss the ring or feel the wrath of retribution. Now he is demanding $230 million of our money to compensate him for his past legal battles. His brazenly amoral personal attorneys running the Justice Department are in charge of deciding whether he gets this payout. The potential seizure of $230 million is a classic “bust out”—soaking a legitimate business of its assets (in this case, the US Treasury) and then, once all value has been extracted, lighting it on fire (or in Trump’s case, tearing down the East Wing).

Some Trump defenders admit that he’s corrupt but shrug it off, saying every president was a disreputable scoundrel and at least Trump is open about it. There’s an air of truth to this: Heading this empire guarantees the committing of war crimes and having your strings pulled by the billionaire class.

But the Trump regime is different. This is a nakedly authoritarian operation, and just about every Republican has bent the knee to a demented, frustrated strongman yearning for martial law—all while he paves the White House Rose Garden and builds his ballroom bunker.

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?”

We all see the Big Lie that Donald Trump is still working to make us believe: that the 2020 election was fixed and that the now-pardoned throng of bloodthirsty clowns and future cabinet members who tried to sack the Capitol were freedom fighters. There is another lie, however: that he is some kind of peacemaker; he is working overtime to brand himself as a future Nobel laureate and great leader instead of a lowlife elevated to the highest office whose only talent is picking the meat off the bones of what remains of a functioning government. He demands that underlings treat him like Cicero instead of the sleazy, aggrieved criminal he has always been.

One of the great jokes of The Sopranos was that Tony did not see himself as a murderous parasite, instead believing himself to be more of a military general or “captain of industry type.” 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 last 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 news shows talk about Trump,” he said, “they’ll say it’s like The Sopranos. People, including your own paper, use The Sopranos as an example of crookedness and culpability. I don’t watch a lot of series television. Unfortunately, what I do is spend my time watching CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. So I get good and depressed and angry.”

“Getting good and depressed and angry”—somehow, it’s comforting to know that Chase is like the rest of us. But Chase is also guilty—at least in the first three seasons, before he turned on his own audience—of pandering to us with the sex, slurs, and violence he aimed to critique. And damn, it was entertaining. The Sopranos was low art—a mobster dramedy—brought to artistic heights.

Maybe Chase, a TV writer of limited success before The Sopranos, could see in 1999 that this country was ready to embrace the archetype of the charming sociopath. Maybe he just stumbled into it and unwittingly altered the history of both Hollywood and politics. Either way, the charming sociopath has escaped the confines of fiction and, from what used to be the White House, is engaged in the ultimate “bust out”: selling off the country in parts while pouring gasoline and striking a match.