As a general rule, people do not compare other people to Donald Trump as a compliment. It is plainly rude to tell another person that you see even trace amounts of Trump in them, but more to the point it is also almost always wrong. For all the try-hards on Twitter aiming to approximate his voice and the many GOP candidates wanly aping his scatterbrained hyperaggression, very few people alive are even remotely similar to Donald Trump.

Some of his more outsize and oafish peers come close, but none quite measure up. New York sports talk radio legend Mike Francesa shares Trump’s drowsy peevishness, a passion for opaque interpersonal feuds with his similarly blowsy peers, and an abiding belief that he has never been wrong, but is finally too small-time an operator. The clammy end-stage Rudolph Giuliani currently butt-dialing reporters and nodding out in cigar bars certainly fits with Trump’s careening personal sloppiness and unseemly thirst for attention, but trades Trump’s plummy savoir-faire for spittle and sozzle. WWE chieftain Vince McMahon, whose head Trump once shaved in the ring as part of a wrestling storyline, has Trump’s carnie avarice and an aesthetic sense that’s similarly stuck in 1987, but is entirely too active in his cynicism. To truly be like Donald Trump, not just in the sense of being cruel in a lazy way and ignorant in a superheated one but also being anywhere near as relentlessly aggrieved, you pretty much have to be Donald Trump. It’s a time-consuming thing, and other people have jobs.

But then the point of making a comparison to Trump isn’t really to be correct. The point of making the comparison is making the comparison, and then letting people notice how unflattering it is. When people are described as Trumpian, it is generally just a wised-up way of saying that the people in question are coarse, extremely distasteful, and—if you’ll pardon the political science jargon—suck a lot. When, say, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign calls Bernie Sanders “the Trump of the left,” it is trying first and foremost to make a point about how rude and unseemly Sanders and his campaign are. It’s not helpful as a comparison, but it is useful, in the way that someone describing rush-hour traffic as “positively Hobbesian” is useful. It tells you more about the pretensions and anxieties and intentions of the person making the comparison than it does about the subject of the comparison itself.

That there is no valid parallel to be made between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is, in this sense, precisely the reason why that comparison has been made, in increasingly overt and desperate ways, in recent weeks. The comparison isn’t about the few things that Sanders and Trump have in common, which amount to tri-state accents abrasive enough to cut glass and the fact that both have been saying the same things over and over again for decades. Even on that last point, though, the difference between the two is both obvious and telling. Sanders has been assailing the cultural and political violence that follows economic inequality and unfettered capitalism for his entire adult life; Trump has been roughly as consistent pushing the line that various swimsuit models “were very interested” upon meeting Trump in the VIP area at the China Club during Ronald Reagan’s second term. Each holds well-attended rallies; Sanders’s are pitched at people otherwise outside politics, where Trump’s are merely styled that way. Both aspire to be elected president of the United States later this year. But the two are not the same, or similar.

Both aspire to be elected president of the United States later this year. But the two are not the same, or similar.

This is mostly why, when Democratic consultants and campaign operatives hint at the similarities between Trump and Sanders or the rotation pundits on MSNBC do the same, or when Joe Biden describes the behavior of Sanders’s supporters (if not the candidate himself) as “Trump-like,” or when ostensibly conflicted Never Trumpers like The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin keep turning up parallels between the Democratic front-runner and the Republican president, it all feels kind of grasping and desperate and off. These are not exceptionally discerning minds, of course, but even if they remain stuck on describing the shape of what the candidates do instead of addressing what they propose, they surely can see the difference between the bloated marzipan golem who currently lords over a lawless archipelago of concentration camps for immigrants and the most reliably left-wing figure in Congress over the last three decades.