“He’s self-funding his campaign,” they said.

“He isn’t beholden to special interests like other politicians,” they said.

If you voted for Trump and believed those statements, or are a Trump supporter and have uttered something like them, you have been played for a fool.

Breaking news Wednesday evening is that Donald J. Trump, billionaire and Republican presidential nominee-elect, will not be self-funding his general election campaign. “I’ll be putting up money, but won’t be completely self-funding,” Trump told the press before asserting he will be putting in place a “world-class finance organization.” No doubt Trump’s experience in bankruptcies and poorly financed casinos combined with his love of spendthrift political hacks who sell their soul to the highest bidder (see: Wiley, Rick or any other number of Trump campaign aides) will help with that “world-class” fundraising machine.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“The new plan represents a shift for Mr. Trump, who has for months portrayed his Republican opponents as “puppets” for relying on super PACs and taking contributions from wealthy donors that he said came with strings attached.”

Yes, now that he has secured the nomination Trump can shed all those conservative sounding things (there weren’t many, believe me) he said during the primary so he can become the creature that he always was. Donald Trump has never been, and is not, a conservative. He has always been, and is now, about himself and his ego. His strategy for the GOP primary was to play Republican voters and anyone who voted in the GOP primary for him as a fool.

That strategy worked.

Meanwhile, the GOP elites that Trump’s candidacy was supposed to be a sort of crude gesture toward are, after good conservatives of principle in the party have embraced #NeverTrump, signaling that they will bow before Smaug and make peace at any price. “Life is a series of choices, and this choice looks like one between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, ” declared former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to the Washington Post. “Anybody who proposes a third party is saying, ‘Let’s make sure Clinton wins.'”

Wrong. Life does include binary choices, but it is not entirely made up of binary choices. Sometimes principles play a role, but that’s not something Mr. Barbour would be familiar with.

For his part, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the leader of Senate Republicans in Washington, released a statement late Wednesday that read in part: “I have committed to supporting the nominee chosen by Republican voters, and Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee, is now on the verge of clinching that nomination.”

That Trump would reverse himself should be no surprise, that the same GOP elites who repeatedly sold out conservatives would bow before him should shock no one. Alas, some will feign surprise.