David Chase is making the interview rounds ahead of the 20th anniversary of The Sopranos and his upcoming prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark. He's already weighed in on what he feels the impact of his beloved show is and shared a bit about the hotly anticipated movie, but in a new interview, Chase told the New York Times how James Gandolfini's beloved don would feel about the current president and where A.J. would have ended up in Trump's circle of cronies.
The topic of the president came up when the Times asked Chase what he felt the legacy of The Sopranos was.
"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," he said, while discussing the current Peak TV landscape. "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."
That led interviewer Jeremy Egner to remember that A.J. closed out the series hoping to become a helicopter pilot for Trump. They asked Chase where he thought that relationship would lead.
"He might be the new chief of staff," he said, "He’d be buddy-buddy with Stephen Miller, I know that."
While A.J. would be close to Trump, Chase thinks Tony would see through the president's shtick.
"He would think the guy was full of [expletive]. Whether he thought he was a good president or not — I don’t know that Tony thought much about that question at all, with anybody who was in office. But I know Tony would have thought Trump was penny-ante, in terms of his lying and presentation," he said.
Since Trump has skin as thick as milk, expect to hear from him over Chase's comments (even if he's already moved on to another HBO show).
