The New York Times ended its Apprentice-like endorsement special titled “The Choice” with a twist befitting a reality TV show spectacle. The editorial board gave a rose to both Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. Despite being in a dead heat for first, Bernie Sanders wound up at the bottom of the pile, with only one vote from the 15-member panel. In explaining why the Vermont senator didn’t get the nod, the Times sang a familiar refrain: “Three years into the Trump administration, we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.”

So according to the Times, Sanders is basically another Trump.

Yeah, sure.

A criminal slumlord is just like a dedicated public servant.

A guy who took out a full-page ad baying for the blood of five wrongfully arrested black teens is the same as someone who spent his youth organizing for racial equality.

A cynical opportunist who changes his mind every other day is the spitting image of a person who has been fighting for the same set of convictions his whole life.

A crass bully who mocks his opponents is virtually indistinguishable from a a person whose collegiality and kindness has never been questioned by even his worst political enemies.

The comparison is absurd on its face, but for some reason Sanders’ critics keep going back to the well. Even the best iteration of this argument written by a nationally syndicated writer comes across as extraordinarily facile.

In a column titled “Bernie Sanders is the left’s Trump,” Dana Milbank described Sanders and Trump as two “angry old white guys with crazy hair, New York accents and flair for demagoguery.”

Lest you think him shallow, Milbank explains that the similarities aren’t just superficial:

Sanders isn’t Trump in the race-baiting, lender-cheating, fact-avoiding, porn-actress-paying, Putin-loving sense. But their styles are similar: shouting and unsmiling, anti-establishment and anti-media, absolutely convinced of their own correctness, attacking bogeyman (the “1 percent” and CEOs in Sanders’ case, instead of immigrants and minorities), offering impractical promises with vague details, lacking nuance and nostalgic for the past.

Milbank addresses the obvious objections to the analogy, but the case he makes for their similarity is no less ridiculous.

It’s less hateful, perhaps, to blame billionaires than immigrants or “globalists” for America’s troubles, but the scapegoating is similar.

But billionaires actually are to blame for the nation’s problems in a way that immigrants are not. It’s hardly “scapegoating” to point out that the concentration of wealth gives the few power over the many—or that they pursue their own interests at the expense of everyone else’s.

There’s a direct relationship between Walmart workers’ poverty and the Walton family’s labor practices. The country’s permanent state of war is inextricably linked to the strength of the defense lobby. It’s not “Trumpian” to suggest that the wealthiest man alive—someone who tried to buy municipal elections in his company’s home city—might also try to influence the coverage of one his most vocal critics in a paper he owns.

If we don’t blame the the ones with all the power, then who is to blame?

Like most of these arguments against Sanders, it’s hard to tell if it’s just a cynical smear or if those making it sincerely believe what they’re saying.

In Milbank’s case, it’s probably a little bit of both.

Though he’s known for his trollish contrarianism, there’s a logical explanation for why Milbank might genuinely view these “angry old white guys with crazy hair” as being one and the same. When Trump demonizes immigrants it may be more “hateful,” but when Sanders goes after the elites, it hits a little closer to home for a former member of Skull and Bones.

While Trump vilifies marginalized groups with whom Milbank has little in common — refugees, Muslims, black people and the poor— Sanders directs his ire toward people who may, like Milbank, have had the shared experience of masturbating in a coffin while reciting their sexual histories.