If you want find the truth in politics, follow the money. And the Trump campaign’s latest Federal Election Commission filing shows why the self-proclaimed billionaire and conservative populist deserves to be known as Con Man Donald.

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All the spin of a celebrity demagogue can't eclipse the fact that the thicket of 22 businesses that he has paid through his campaign are evidence of a Potemkin marketing empire that exists to fund his lifestyle while avoiding as many taxes as possible in the process.

Old habits die hard and based on the filing and its payments to Trump Ice and other afterthought entities, my guess is that when and if Con Man Donald ever releases his taxes we’ll see the true meaning of what his fellow 1980s real estate celebutante, Leona Helmsley, used to say: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

Back in March, The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi pointed out that Donald Trump was paying himself to run for president. This was controversial at the time. Now it’s simple fact.

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The details of the Federal Election report are alternately hilarious and depressing. For a certain kind of political nerd, paging through disbursements offers insight into the mundane day to day of a presidential campaign. Their airplane tickets and meals at random restaurants in Iowa and New Hampshire, there is $15,000 here and $2,500 there, paid to consultants and staffers (hint: the part-time consultants always make more money than the full-time staffers).

But what you see with Con Man Donald is out‑of‑control expenses that have little or nothing to do with the basic operational responsibility of running a presidential campaign. Instead, we see $423,000 paid in rental fees to his estate/club Mar-a-Lago (which he could have just gifted as a self-funded candidate rather than charged back to the campaign), and $394,000 spent on Trump-branded jets. He spent over $200,000 on hats and $35,000 on a New Hampshire-based online ad company called Draper-Sterling, but nothing on building swing state organizations or television ads. The whole operation is like Trump’s hair— a few gilded threads spun together to give the impression of substance when there is plainly nothing underneath.

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Daily Beast