Well in the past he ran for president, too, always on a hype-media issue like Obama's birth certificate that wouldn't actually give him any chance of running, yet allowed him to put his name in the media. (exposure is probably his biggest business model, the more exposure he has, the more people view him as a success, the easier he can get a TV show or license out his name for some building or golf resort he doesn't own). So in the past he never actually did anything a normal politician would do, i.e. fundraising, or indeed divulging his financial assets when officially filing the paperwork, because he just used the presidential race as some form media platform for a few weeks, very much like say Kickstarter, for his business.

This time around it's a bit different, he seems to actually be campaigning, participating in debates, filing the paperwork. But even now I still don't think he's serious about running. I mean the way he talks about policies is just a joke. 'I'm gonna make America so great, I'm gonna make you soooo proud, you're going to become the happiest people', I mean it's just laughable. Anyway my point is that he doesn't have any real policy plans. He's like some of the Dutch politicians we have over here that make policy promises that they can't keep because they break Dutch, international and European laws and agreements that the Netherlands has signed. Everyone who knows anything about how the world works laughs at this, but people eat it up. So I'm still not convinced he's actually interested to run for the office all the way, (although I'm less sure about it than ever) and if that's true he's not going to be serious about raising millions from big donors, so Trump's paper trail isn't surprising in the least. Here you can see how little he raised as of earlier this month [0] That type of money can't sustain popularity in the real elections when people spend $300m on attacking every single thing you do from every single angle all over TV, Radio, print and the internet, which is why people are skeptical combined with Trump's lack of policy plans, lack of solid political team who's working on real policy plans and disingenuous campaigns in the best (I wanna be president cause Obama is from Kenya).

Beyond that, it's early days. The last presidential elections all had $1b dollar budgets for both candidates of the ruling parties for example, and both parties spent about $1b each. (Obama, Romney, McCain), and both candidates had 2/3rd or more of their money coming from large donors. Lastly, it's an interesting note to make that Obama spent 2x as much per vote than McCain in 2008, and about 40% more than Romney per vote. I don't think it'll be much different for anyone who wants to win this day and age, Clinton, Bush, Trump or Bernie.

Also if you look at fundraising, nearly half of it goes through parties rather than individuals, and those parties then put their weight behind the nominee. That fundraising isn't covered in this article, and it's exactly that fundraising which is most lopsided towards large contributors. So really I think it's much too soon to make any sweeping conclusions. After all, a guy like Bernie earlier this month had raised just $15m. That's top 6 by the way, not a small amount, but given the winner of the election is likely to spend more than $1 billion, the distribution of 1% of the early funding days probably isn't very significant.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/electio...