For reasons I won’t go into involving a green double decker bus, a holiday cottage in St Ives and some raw scallops, I started watching a box set of the Sopranos in September 2023, rather later than the rest of the world, which had finished with the mobsters from Brooklyn in June 2007. We finally reached the 21st episode of series 6 a few months before Christmas 2024. And reacted in much the same way as I now gather (having researched it primarily to check I hadn’t got an incomplete box set) the rest of the world did over 17 years ago.

There are many advantages to watching something so long after the media around it has moved on. You get left in peace to watch it at your own pace. No one is giving you spoilers in little teasers stuck between other programmes. The chat shows are not talking about it. You don’t have to hear what every minor celebrity thought about it. You aren’t being constantly encouraged to get excited about it. You can just watch it.

However, now I have read up on the reaction at the time and the increasingly irritated responses of the show’s creator David Chase to the line of questioning he was getting about it, I think there is something for us here in March 2025. In particular, I am thinking about the following comment Chase made soon after the last episode first aired:

[The ending] said much more than Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head, or taking over the New York mob. Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted “justice”. I thought that was disgusting, frankly.

Chase also made reference to the fact that the US was involved in war against the Taliban in Afghanistan at the time and the Al-Qaeda unexploded car bombs in London that month:

There was a war going on that week and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings.

Which brings me to Donald Trump. Chase was interviewed by, amongst others, The Irish Times in 2019, the 20th anniversary of the first episode, and Trump perhaps inevitably came up in response to a question about the influences The Sopranos has had:

The use of a deeply flawed hero and his problems. And when news shows talk about Trump, for example, 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.

What struck me about The Sopranos was how chaos followed him everywhere he went. Any normal person who interacted with his people got exploited, corrupted if possible and often destroyed, whether it was an AA sponsor who gets drawn into gambling on a scale he can’t handle, or someone who wants to cooperate in a movie, or even the staff and other patients where Tony is recuperating from being shot. He appears to be behaving normally and then he will suddenly beat up his own bodyguard for no other reason than to show his people that he’s not over the hill. He is both ridiculously sentimental and utterly ruthless if he feels threatened. And yet you are still left rooting for him a lot of the time, which of course is what made it such a fascinating series and also explained the consternation when the screen went black.

Now this is all very well when we are talking about a fictional character heading up a mob operation in Brooklyn. However it becomes something else entirely when it is a real President of the United States. There are so many perils to dealing with Trump: those which are like The Sopranos, ie the danger of being exploited, corrupted and destroyed by him. We saw this in full operation yesterday in the extraordinary treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy by him and his chief henchman JD Vance.

But what seems more important to me is that we focus on the perils of dealing with Trump which are not like The Sopranos at all: the inclination to cheer him on because he appears to be playing by different rules to the ones which we feel imprison us on a daily basis. So when he misuses charitable funds for political purposes and gets fined $2 million by the New York State Attorney General, we should refrain from cheering.

When Trump is fined $450 million dollars for financial fraud and illegal conduct, we should not just regard it as the rough and tumble of politics.

And when he is found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him a convicted felon, it is not, as he claims “a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt”, to be laughed off as just another one of Trump’s scrapes from which he emerges victorious.

We need to get our heads up out of the onion rings. This is not TV entertainment, it is the immediate future of the United States, impacting all of us whose countries need to interact with them without being exploited, corrupted or destroyed. He poses a serious risk to all of us.

So the question is what to do about it? This is what I intend to address in my next post.