This declaration reads as a bold, principled stand—a move against the horse-racing and herd-thinking and hive-minding that have been longstanding sources of dissatisfaction with American political reporting. And on the one hand, sure, that’s partially what this is: It’s HuffPost, ever proud in its perspective, rejecting the easy conveniences of news categories and claiming that not all candidates—not all “candidates”—deserve the press attention traditionally accorded to those who seek the White House.

There’s a subtlety to the logic here. HuffPost’s statement isn’t claiming that Donald Trump, currently a leading presidential candidate in a crowded GOP field, doesn’t deserve coverage; it is claiming instead that Donald Trump, currently a leading presidential candidate in a crowded GOP field, deserves neither his front-runner status nor the attention that comes with it. Polls and press coverage, after all, are notoriously chicken-and-egg-y. And HuffPost, of course, is taking an opinion that many Americans share—that Trump is a wind-bagging buffoon—and converting it into an editorial stand. That is its right as a publication. It is also, to the extent that the what of news coverage is as journalistically important as the how, its duty.

And yet. The Republican primary electorate seems to disagree with HuffPost. You can quibble with the polling numbers, sure; it is another matter to ignore them.

There’s also the fact that most readers, who come to news articles via Facebook or Twitter or URLs emailed by friends, pay zero attention to the section that happens to house a given story—meaning that Trump stories with “entertainment” buried in their URLs are essentially the same as Trump stories with “politics” buried in them. (You could also add that HuffPost’s Entertainment vertical likely gets much more traffic than its Politics vertical—meaning that the move will likely end up generating more, not less, attention for Trump, bringing his antics to the notice even of those readers who generally ignore politics. Nor has HuffPost foresworn the revenue from the ads served alongside these stories.)

The other issue, though, is that HuffPost, with its announcement, may be drawing a line between politics and entertainment that is impossible to discern in 2015.

Yes, granted: Trump—cf. the excess of outraged takes on his excessively outrageous comments, the emerging wire-photo sub-genre that delights in capturing his orange-hued face mid-yell—is on top of all else an entertainer. Granted: He connects, according to the best metrics available, with large swaths of the American electorate. Granted: He is a reality-TV star, and applies the skills required of that work to his campaign.

Which is also to say that Trump, in his candidacy, is being exactly who we want him to be. “We” as participants in the media system as it currently operates, and “we” as that hazy body commonly shorthanded as “the American public.” We ask—actually, we demand—that our politicians be not just intelligent and well-informed and quick-witted and concerned about, as it usually goes, “people like me,” but also that they be sources of drama and distraction and indignation and delight. They should be charming, but not smarmy. Well-spoken, but approachable. Good-looking, but not vain about it. Vying as they are to be entertainers-in-chief as well as commanders-in-chief, they should be skilled at both delivering zingers at the White House Correspondents Dinner and issuing orders in the Situation Room. They should channel hopes and fears and the past and the future, inspiring effortlessly, delighting daily, serving, metaphorically, at once as parents and pals.