Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Ben
• Position: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

Not a yooge difference

As a Bronx native I've spent the campaign quietly weighing Donald Trump's New York accent against that of Bernie Sanders. I can declare a split decision. Trump has the better vowels: His yooge obliterates Sanders's yooge, the perfect measure of dismissiveness without dwelling on itself. But Sanders has the better consonants: when he says speculation, each syllable is a saliva receptacle. What is especially great about both of these accents is that no New Yorkers speak like that anymore, not even in deepest Canarsie. The city is too diverse; its population changes too constantly. Accents so extreme could only be preserved in environments where their bearers did not regularly interact with other New Yorkers: Burlington, Vermont, in one case, and a quartz penthouse in the other.

Trump's favorite bureaucrats

A few days before the New Hampshire primary, I happened into a Donald Trump rally in Exeter, at the same town hall where Abraham Lincoln once delivered a speech when he was running for president, in i860. Trump's rallies have become notorious, for their rowdiness and nativist anger and general atmosphere of menace, but having been to several I can report that the scene is not always quite this bad. A lot seems to depend upon Trump's mood. Sometimes you get Benito Mussolini, and sometimes it's just an amiable drunk who keeps forgetting that he's in the quiet car.

This day in particular Trump was in a ruminative mood; possibly his recent loss in the Iowa caucuses had chastened him. He spent a great deal of time talking about the hotel project that his real estate company is developing in the Old Post Office Pavilion, the gorgeous and ornate building, capped by an actual clock tower, a few blocks east of the White House. The renovation was running ahead of schedule and under budget, Trump said, and he made a case for its social impact: hotels, he said, employ more people than offices do. He suggested that he had been surprised to win the project in the first place (he intimated that the Hilton hotel corporation, rival bidders, had outsized political influence with the Obama crowd) and then mentioned that he'd been extremely impressed with the bureaucrats from the General Services Administration (GSA) whom he'd worked with. "Extremely professional. They're unbelievable. They're very talented people."

When it comes to hotels in Washington, I'm basically pro glitz. The bars and lobbies in the capital are almost uniformly stultifying, as if they've been designed for the uncle of the Portuguese ambassador. So Trump's progress report, which promised something different, was good news to me. But Trump's enthusiasm for the men and women of the GSA triggered for me a very specific memory from about a decade ago when I was an editor at the Washington Monthly. One late night when I was going over Charlie Peters's Tilting at Windmills column with him, we discussed an item in which he had reported that the Department of Justice contained the most prestigious of all bureaucratic jobs in Washington. Idly, without considering what I was getting myself into, I wondered what was the least prestigious. With the exactitude of an eye surgeon considering a cataract, Charlie ranked every agency in Washington according to its bureaucratic prestige. "And finally," he concluded, having listed every existing agency, and possibly some expired ones, "the General Services Administration." If Donald Trump can find it in himself not only to praise bureaucrats but to praise bureaucrats from the least prestigious wing of the entire federal government, perhaps all will not be lost in the Trump administration.

Like asking an enemy for the map of the minefield

There are these hints scattered through the archives of the New York tabloids that in his own mind Trump has been a political figure, of a sort, for a very long time. In 1984 he told the Washington Post that if his country needed a...