During COVID shutdown, my husband and I binge watched a lot of television. My husband forced me to watch every single season of The Crown except the one in my head where they put everybody’s head on spikes around Buckingham Palace and denounce their very long history of racism and colonialism. In return, I forced him to watch every single episode of the West Wing (infinity episodes) and The Sopranos (far too short at one billion seasons). I learned several things from both of them.
1) We would be better off in every way if we let the writers, directors, producers and the cast of The West Wing take over the day-to-day operations of the United States Government for the next decade or so;
2) Tony Soprano would have been a much better president than the low class, low IQ idiot we have in there now. Sure, they’re both grifters but given a choice, come on, Tony Soprano’s got it way over Donald Trump plus he’s better at what he does, not sure what it is but he can’t be worse at it.
Trump is all over being a television mob boss but he lacks the – okay, everything – to pull that off. Loyalty is so big in the Sopranos. Family is everything, old friends are like family. Like Trump, Tony Soprano found jobs even for his most inept relatives but unlike Trump, he stuck by them to a ridiculous extent. Trump, however, switches them out as soon as they say, “Lemme see….” To anything.
So here we are in a terrifying conundrum in Iran that Jeb Bartlett would have solved in the ‘one day’ that Trump bandied about as the amount of time he would need to end the war in Ukraine, the war on Gaza and all the other wars in countries so ‘shithole’ that he can’t remember, if he ever knew, their names. He would have done it easily, within the space of a single episode because The West Wing is fiction.
Another thing I learned from television, that Trump didn’t learn yet is that television is different than reality, even well-written reality. On tv, characters have to do and say what the writer/director/producer tells them to do and say. In real life, for better or worse, people (characters) do whatever they want to regardless of what the fake President, fake-Mob Boss or fake King/Queen tells them to do.
For most people it’s not a steep learning curve. It comes early when we see Wile E. Coyote run through a wall, leaving a hole his own size, and come out the other side completely well. In real life that almost never happens.
Poor Donald, he bought the whole thing. Fake wrestling, fake mafia, fake war, fake leadership, fake power, fake personhood..
Now he’s stuck in this shitty job where nobody does what he wants them to unless he pays them and often even when he does. Then they leave, or he kicks them out and starts over with someone more loyal, more likely to agree with him, more willing to do whatever he says even when it’s just a moment’s impulse, like running through a wall.
He lives in a very big world where other people not only disagree with him, worse, they exist. They have autonomy. They have separate cultures, beliefs, experiences, languages from his and I think I speak for everyone in the World when I say that nobody wants to sleep with him, be with him, talk to him, listen to him or prolong his natural life by even the amount of time it takes Wile E. Coyote to pass through a solid wall.
It’s lonely at the bottom. I can’t wait until the series finally ends.
By Jackie Davis Martin
On July 5, 2025
Laura, this is simultaneously painful and delightful to read. You’ve referenced two of my very favorite series — West Wing and the Sopranos- and used them in such a clever way to comment on the current disaster in the White House. I see you wrote that a few days ago. How could you know that he would pay them, even with this bill where they sell the public down the tubes– did they did all that for a baseball cap? a meme coin? an autograph?
How did those programs end? Tony and his family were in a diner, I remember. The rest of society? Tony was endearing because he went to a shrink. He knew. Oh well— I’m writing more than you — and your writing is right on here!