Ben Carson should consider suing for equal time. He, too, is an outsider who has struck a nerve and rocketed up in the polls, but he gets a fraction of the coverage of Trump. No one consistently live-broadcasts his events. No one badgers all the other candidates to address every little thing he says.

The difference is that Donald Trump rates. So the self-styled gatekeepers of our politics, who take themselves so seriously, are happy to slum it with him.

Any other candidate would be delighted to get Trump’s wall-to-wall coverage. But it comes with a downside. We are a culture of intense, and transient, interests. The line between being the hottest thing in the country and yesterday’s news is thinner than ever. With every moment that Trump is on the screen, we get a little closer to the moment when people might get sick of him being on the screen. Even Miley Cyrus probably thinks he is overexposed.

If it’s too much to expect the media to give up its Trump obsession, it can at least vow never again to ask a candidate not named Donald Trump about Donald Trump. The other contenders don’t deserve to be made bit players in a media-driven reality show.