David Chase used to fret about the fans of The Sopranos. Many, he knew, understood the series he’d created as he’d intended them to: as a dark, comic, critical portrait of turn-of-the-century America gone off the rails—over-medicated, under-secure, with violence, greed, and anxiety at its heart. Others, he feared, tuned in for everything that surrounded that story: the tits, the ass, the cursing, and, above all, the bloodshed. If those things formed the Trojan horse in whose belly Chase had smuggled his art onto television, he knew that many viewers were content to pet the pretty horsey while paying no mind to what might lie inside. As he put it in one of our interviews for my book *Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution, from The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and *Breaking Bad, still angry about a columnist who had complained about “nothing happening” in a season premiere: “What are you watching for? Just to see big Tony Soprano take a guy’s head and slam it against the wall like a cantaloupe?” He shook his own head, as though he’d failed.

My response at the time, at least privately, was something along the lines of, “Gee, Mr. Chase, so sorry that you’ve stumbled on the Holy Grail of popular entertainment, a creation that’s both critically acclaimed and embraced by the masses. How tragic that, like poets and artists since the dawn of time, you can’t control the precise manner in which your audience consumes your art. I do hope the millions of dollars this unfortunate circumstance allows you to spend on producing it (not to mention that you’ve taken home) goes part of the way toward easing the pain.” Or as Livia Soprano herself might have put it, more succinctly: “Poor you.”

But that was before Trump.

Ever since the rise of The Donald, a surprising number of people have asked me whether—in addition to more obvious primordial ponds of pop culture: reality television, pro wrestling, 24-hour news—part of his oozing path was cleared by the antiheroes that have dominated prestige television since The Sopranos. Did these shows blur the lines between humanization and celebration? Had our capacity for outrage been dulled? Did they give us a taste for monsters?

My answer is this: TV’s difficult men didn’t invent Donald Trump. But he is what they were warning us about.

After all, the emotional journey of these shows was primal attraction, followed by conscious repulsion. We thrilled to Walter White’s or Tony Soprano’s or Al Swearengen’s transgressions, and then recoiled, both from the men and from our own unseemly excitement. It was a whiplashing slide down the super-ego-ego-id ladder and back up again, a ride at its best moments so rapid that the various states were close to queasily simultaneous.

Trump is what happens when you take only the first half of that journey—when you descend and never come back up. He’s the thrill without the recoil. The act without the critique. The body ungoverned by brain. Pure impulse and thus pure, dumb, terrifying entertainment. Chase was right to fear and loathe those who might seduced by that equation.

Tony, on the other hand, would probably approve—and not just because he and Trump shared similar taste in interior design. I have no doubt that the character we met bemoaning having come in “at the end,” when “the best is over,” would have been the perfect host for the Make America Great Again spore. “Unsettled white man raging against the erosion of his power” is more or less the casting breakdown for both Trump Voter and Soprano, Tony.

And yet Tony was also Trump himself—a permission-granter. Tony not only absolved his admirers’ worst impulses, he celebrated them: say whatever you want, fuck whomever you want, kill whomever you want. (Come to think of it, “revoked his press credentials” would make a nice euphemism for a mob hit.) This is what made one such a fascinating literary character, and the other such a sinister real person. And in a world in which the public’s ability to discern fictional spectacle from sober reality seems increasingly tenuous (see Brexit), it’s what makes Trump so frightening.

For what it’s worth, the current show most explicitly concerned with issues of power and governance, Game of Thrones, has developed a far more conventional view of heroes and villains as it heads towards its denouement. (Ramsay Bolton was not a Difficult Man; he was simply a dick.) And what happy message does it have to pass on? That the good rarely prevail. That nuance is weak while brute force triumphs. That the worst happens regularly and that history curves towards chaos and darkness.

Oh, and that the only hope lies with putting a woman in charge.