Michael Imperioli says many of the mobsters and hangers-on in The Sopranos would likely line up behind Donald Trump if the series were set in 2026, arguing that the characters’ values map neatly onto today’s political tribalism. In an interview with The Independent conducted during Imperioli’s U.K. tour with co-star Steve Schirripa, the actor said “a lot of them would probably be Trump supporters,” then pointed to a tension the show already carried: many of those characters come from immigrant families.
Imperioli, who played Christopher Moltisanti, framed the hypothetical as a story engine rather than a punchline. “The show is about the American dream, especially through the eyes of immigrants,” he said, adding that a present-day version would likely tackle “the current climate in the US and what they’re doing to immigrants.” He underlined the irony by noting that early Italian arrivals often lacked paperwork: “a lot of them were undocumented,” he said, describing that history as easy to ignore when politics turns immigration into a blunt weapon.
The comment lands inside a longer-running conversation about how The Sopranos reads through a modern political lens. David Chase, the show’s creator, previously sketched his own Trump-era thought experiment in a 2019 interview, saying he could picture A.J. fitting into the Trump White House while Tony would view Trump as “full of” bluster and cheap showmanship. Imperioli, who has publicly backed Democrats, did not argue that the characters would share his politics; he suggested the opposite, and treated that gap as part of what keeps the series alive for new viewers.
Nearly two decades after its finale, The Sopranos still functions as a mirror for American appetites—status, grievance, loyalty, self-mythmaking—and Imperioli’s comments revive a blunt question the show always asked: what happens when people chase belonging in a country that keeps moving the goalposts?
