First, I don't know where the $16 figure comes from. $60 million in "small" donations could be defined broadly -- pretty much any donation under $100 is likely to be considered "small". Tho if they define "small" the way they do in Congress for "small" farmers the number could be much higher
Remember that those of us who have been inundated w/various pleas for money from candidates galore have often tapped out as far as our 'favorite' candidate(s) are. In the case of Trump, he has NOT had a massive email list or donation-collecting machine at work, or perhaps even the basic "infrastructure" in place for his own campaign to do so.
But once he became the presumptive nominee, this would begin to shift in a big way. The various donation lists of the Republican Party machine would be made available to him and to his campaign, and they would themselves be working on special lists of Trump supporters that are not among the GOP's 'usual suspects' for donating
Further, it is quite possible that given the extremely high level of disorganization in the Trump campaign, this effort at least by his own campaign to tap its base did not get started as soon as he became the presumptive nominee. It might very well have been well into June before they really got into the swing of things, getting their own 'phone banks' and so forth set up. Usually national campaigns at such an advanced phase would move quicker, but that cannot be assumed even highly probable in the case of Trump.
Then there was the GOP hate-fest starting July 18. Now most DUers and quite possibly a huge proportion of Independents and even Republicans were turned off by it. It was not exactly the most successful convention in history. But for the hard core of support for Trump/the GOP, their convention might well be a turn-on. It's that 1-2 million hard-core "beliebers" so to speak, mass fans of this sort of thing (and a hate-fest is NOT new for a GOP convention -- remember all the 'purple heart band-aids' and such at the GOP Convention in 2004, an at least quasi-victorious/theft year for the GOP -- so again for the hard-core this could be a real turn on
So you have all this 'virgin soil' as far as fundraising for Trump is concern starting to be 'cultivated' en masse for donations, accoompanied by the Party's massive info-mercial with its own 10s of millions of sympathetic viewers at some point during the week, and at least a large PORTION of the core base energized. A sudden surge in donations mainly from that core is hardly bizarre, as a stand-alone fact. But if further investigation turns up more sleaze, or maybe outright lying about the "small" donations, (as there might very well be a modest numbered core of fat-cats who would give a lot as Republican loyalists, despte the well-publicized handful of billionaires who normally give GOP and are outraged by Trump). The "lying" (or misleading about what constitutes a 'small' donation, at the least) would not leave me exactly falling off the floor
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