It’s become a mindless tradition to mock Donald Trump’s appearance. Pictures circulate of his toupee or his golf shorts, and the Internet pounces. There are oranges and pumpkins photoshopped to have tufts of blond hair and gaping mouths. Side-by-side pictures of shirtless Obama and golfing Trump. And, after a checkup revealed Trump to be in good health, nasty comments galore about Trump’s weight.

Here’s the thing: Trump is fat. He’s not conventionally attractive. He’s also a terrible president and a worse human being. And those two sets of facts aren’t related.

In fairness, most of the vitriol about his appearance is a reaction to his behavior. People are rightfully angry about being demeaned, attacked, harassed, and dehumanized by a president who disgraces the office he occupies and the country he represents. They are so outraged that what would otherwise seem mean-spirited now just seems earned: If he’s going to throw respect and courtesy out the window, that works two ways. He chose to fight dirty; everyone else is just playing his game.

And that’s true. But this sort of malicious, gleeful trashing of Trump’s appearance is part of a larger pattern. And it sends an unfortunate message.

Too often, society uses attractiveness as a measurement of someone’s morality. Look no further than fairy tales. The main character is beautiful, and the antagonists are not. (Sometimes they’re even identified by that deficiency—take the Ugly Stepsisters, for example.) The message isn’t subtle: Beauty is a reward for righteousness, and, by extension, ugliness is a punishment for poor character.

But that's a questionable moral for a fictional story, and it's an even worse method of judging real people.

Are we really going to assess a person’s character based on how well they correspond to a bunch of arbitrary—and historically, misogynistic and racist—beauty standards? Do we really believe the luck of inheriting a symmetrical face and a fast metabolism is a sign of moral superiority?

Most of us would answer no to those questions. (“It’s what’s on the inside that counts,” as we were taught in elementary school.) But we’re still retweeting, liking, and laughing at posts about Trump’s appearance and the appearances of other figures we feel justified in disliking.

Even if you think Trump deserves whatever comes to him—and I’m not here to tell you that’s an unfair assessment—consider what laughing at the disaster president’s weight says to the innocent fat person reading your jokes.

Because your jokes about Trump’s looks exist in a larger context of criticism about Trump’s personality, and often, they happen alongside that criticism.

And that implies an equivalency. But let’s not perpetuate the idea that being fat or balding is as bad as being bigoted or cruel.

Calling Trump fat is not shorthand for calling him an unfit president, because those two things are unrelated. It’d be better if you just said what you really mean.

Besides, if you want to criticize Trump, there is an endless trove of material that has nothing to do with how he looks and everything to do with who he is and what he does—which are the real problems threatening our democracy anyway.