Trump is the head, and the other candidates are the long tail.
You said: "It's true that Trump got more pageviews overall, but that seems to be mostly because way more articles were written about him in the first place."
And: "we suggest that if publishers would have written more articles about Clinton, they would have received more page views, because in the data we observe posts on Clinton receive more page views on average"
This seems to be the wrong conclusion because of diminishing returns. Writing more articles about Clinton should still push down the average page views. There is only so much interest, and only so much new to write about every day. None of the candidates can create fresh new controversies to feed the media the way Trump can. The question is how much would that push it down? I don't think it would be inaccurate to suggest, based on that these sites exist in a market, that it would push it down significantly below Trump.
I don't believe a base that strong exists per article, where any article is guaranteed to get some absolute number of page views. If diminishing returns aren't present or are extremely weak, then I'm wrong.
If anything, the data doesn't rule out that sites/reporters are correctly maximizing Trump coverage. Or they may not be maximizing enough since absolute demand is so high and Trump generates so much fresh content. If you can write about one easy topic, and maintain an average that high with only a small decrease in the average, you are doing more with less.