My colleague Reihan Salam, who either in spite of or because of his Arabic name is as deep-dipped a modern Brooklyn man as you might hope to meet, describes Donald J. Trump’s Queens-accented voice as “comforting.” Rick Brookhiser has called the presidential accent “funky.” To my West Texas ear, it sounds a great deal like the hateful and grating voice of Senator Bernie Sanders, who in theory represents Vermont but in fact represents Brooklyn, especially the nuttier parts.
Trump and Sanders not only talk alike when it comes to things such as international trade (bad!), Wall Street (bad!), and immigration (a plot against the working class, and . . . bad!), but they also simply talk alike, with similar accents and patterns of speech. If either man’s life had taken a slightly different turn, it would be easy to imagine them sitting together on the F train out to Trump’s ancestral home in Queens or the B train to Sanders’s corner of Brooklyn, or maybe at the Oyster Bar, and commiserating over the sorry state of affairs in these United States:
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