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TRUMP FANS ARE SUFFERING FROM TONY SOPRANO SYNDROME  
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Adam Serwer
December 5, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ Judge Dredd, Tony Soprano, The Supes. They're all meant to be
villains in cautionary tales against the danger of violent, fascistic,
cultist leaders. But some Trump followers, including Elon Musk, think
they're meant to be heroes to be emulated. _

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In every Judge Joe Dredd
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read, there is at least one almost comically obvious moment when the
author makes clear that the protagonist is a jackbooted fascist and
not someone to admire. This may come across to the average reader as
heavy-handed, but when the richest man in the world misreads the
character as heroic, you can see why such heavy-handedness is
sometimes necessary.

Shortly before former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida withdrew
his nomination for attorney general, Elon Musk posted on X
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the “Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put
powerful bad actors in prison.” Generally speaking, one’s model
for justice should not be a fascist invented in part to illustrate the
distinction between elite impunity and the brutality that ordinary
people face. (Were Dredd’s zero tolerance for lawbreaking evenly
applied to obscenely wealthy scofflaws
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Musk himself, it would surely be less appealing to him.)

Musk’s media illiteracy is not particularly shocking—it seems to
be part of a broader trend tied to the rise of Donald Trump. Genre
stories that are meant to highlight the dangers of fascism, cruelty,
or selfishness instead end up being misinterpreted or even condemned
by those who find fascism appealing or see cruelty and selfishness as
aspirational virtues.

Adam Serwer: There is no constitutional mandate for authoritarianism
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The messaging in Dredd stories verges on didactic, but it also assumes
at least a tacit objection to fascism in the reader. One of the
series’ co-creators, Pat Mills [[link removed]],
has said that his model for Dredd and the other judges
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the monks at his parochial school, who subjected children to physical
or sexual abuse. The stories are set in a dystopian future where
several “megacities,” surrounded by a radioactive wasteland, are
ruled by draconian judges. Initially established by the character of
Eustace Fargo in response to rampant street crime, this judge system
empowers its agents to convict and sentence those they deem criminals,
and simply kill many of the people they encounter.

As mentioned, the implications of these stories are not exactly
subtle. In one 2019 story arc, _The Small House_, Dredd confronts
Judge Smiley, the Justice Department’s chief of black ops, over
Smiley’s use of invisible assassins to murder democracy activists in
Mega-City One. Dredd’s main objection to Smiley’s operations, it
seems, is that Smiley’s assassinations are not following proper
protocol. Dredd has no moral objection to killing democracy activists,
but it has to be done by the book. Smiley calmly explains to Dredd,
“We’re fascists. We rule. It’s the only way we can survive in
this irradiated, dead world.”

Dredd is a true believer in the judge system, and as such lacks the
corruption of his contemporaries. This renders him ethically superior
only to the other fascists, however; he is an unthinking armed goon
who would never allow the system to be changed just because the
majority would prefer it. He acts fanatically in service to the unjust
system he upholds, not to any larger ideals of honor or integrity. In
the 2006 storyline _Origins_, a cryogenically frozen Fargo is briefly
thawed and begs Dredd to undo the judge system. “It was never meant
to be forever,” Fargo pleads, just before dying. “We’re the
monster, we got greedy—wanted everything—so we killed the dream
Joe, we killed America!” Dredd, being Dredd, ignores Fargo’s pleas
and, when asked later about Fargo’s last words, says Fargo wanted
him to “keep the faith,” forever burying Fargo’s wish to end the
judge system in favor of democratic rule.

As Trump reshapes the nation in his image, some of his supporters seem
inclined to turn cautionary tales on their head, empathizing with
villains or antiheroes to such a degree that they miss the point of
these stories entirely, even when the writers make the message as
clear as possible. We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome,
after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided
voter told
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York Times_ focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the
antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad
things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he
represents.”

Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way
that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. _The
Sopranos_ is by any measure
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of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily
travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with
keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a
murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love.
He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness
helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is
true of Walter White, the protagonist of _Breaking Bad_, who at one
point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his
crimes, “I did it for me.”

Again, the creators could not be more clear that these characters are
horrible people whom others should not seek to emulate. There is a
difference between thinking Darth Vader is an awesome character in the
fictional context of _Star Wars_ and, you know, _wanting to be like
Darth Vader_, a psychotic child-killer. Quite similarly, Trump could
not be more clear that he is out for himself, seeking the power of the
presidency to enrich himself and his allies, protect himself from
legal jeopardy, and bask in the cultlike adulation of his followers.
But fans of Tony or Walter, living vicariously through the power and
cruelty of the object of their admiration, invert the moral
implications of those characters’ stories such that selfishness and
malice are justified or laudable. In the same way, Trump supporters
treat the real-life Trump, who seeks power for his own gain, as a
fictionalized Trump whose vices are in service to a selfless cause.

Tony and Walter are also aspirational figures for a certain type of
man experiencing a certain type of midlife crisis because, despite
their body aging and their looks fading, they can still shape the
world around them with a seemingly infinite capacity to endure or
inflict violence. They want to tell themselves they’re protecting
something—home and hearth perhaps—but actually want to validate
themselves with a justification for hurting someone else, even if they
have to invent one.

This is one reason the actor Anna Gunn, who portrayed Walter’s wife,
Skylar, drew an intense backlash
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was the embodiment of the nitpicky wife whose jealousy held her
husband back from greatness (as a murdering meth kingpin).

Walter represents the emotional state of a particular type of
viewer—someone who wants to enjoy his ability to make himself feel
good through violence and suffering, and doesn’t want his good time
spoiled by a mouthy woman reminding him that the things he is doing
are actually bad. This type of reactionary masculinity is itself
emblematic of the Trump era, as if conservatives listened to feminist
critiques of “toxic masculinity
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and decided to shear all virtue from their conception of traditional
manhood and retain only those parts that involve dominance and
exploitation of others.

Examples abound. Last year, another heavy-handed comic-book
adaptation, the television series _The Boys—_about a covert-ops
group that targets the irresponsible corporate-produced “supers”
who kill more people than they actually save—made its criticism of
fascism so overt that many of its fascist-sympathetic fans began to
get upset. These fans complained that the show had gotten “woke”
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the plot began to more plainly illustrate the political points it had
been making all along, to the dismay of those fans who were living
vicariously through the antagonists’ acts of cruelty.

Similarly, the creators of the murderous Marvel Comics’ vigilante
the Punisher have repeatedly clarified, to no avail, that, despite
possessing some virtues, the character of Frank Castle is not a good
guy. In addition to being a murderer, he is occasionally portrayed as
a fascist
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During the _Civil War_ storyline, Castle is told off by his idol,
Captain America, who describes Castle as  “psychotic,” fulfilling
a “twisted notion of justice.” The Punisher creator Gerry
Conway has called the embrace
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Punisher iconography by real-life armed agents of the state
“disturbing,” because “the Punisher represents a failure of the
Justice system. He’s supposed to indict the collapse of social moral
authority and the reality [that] some people can’t depend on
institutions like the police or the military to act in a just and
capable way.”

The collapse of trust in institutions is one of the stories of the
past decade or so. But so is this moral degeneracy, motivated by the
need to ideologically justify the place of a corrupt authoritarian
strongman in the most powerful government in the world. What looks
like declining media literacy may be something much worse—an
affirmation of the underlying values in dystopian literature that
inevitably lead to the dystopia itself.

_Adam Serwer [[link removed]] is a
staff writer at The Atlantic._

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* cults
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* Fascism
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* Sopranos
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