Updated: Did Trump hire actors to populate his presidential run announcement?

After we blogged about Donald Trump's bizarre presidential campaign announcement, we promised ourselves we wouldn't make a regular thing of writing about him, not when there are things of substance upon which we are duty-bound to shed light.

But, alas, in fewer than 24 hours, we have broken our vow to alert you of the strong possibility that Trump's campaign may have paid some actors to attend the event. (We have since learned this is indeed the case; $50 a pop.)

Angelo Carusone, executive vice president of Media Matters for America and organizer of the Dump Trump campaign, writes that he thought something might be askew when he saw a familiar face in one of the photos from the event.

"The gentleman who posted the pic is a paid actor who regularly posts photos from his gigs on social media," he writes. "This seemed like all the others from his gigs that he posts."

Carusone also did a little digging and found that the young woman in the same picture was also an actress. 

This wouldn't be the first time we've seen someone pay actors to pretend to back an unlikeable cause. Earlier this spring, it was revealed that a group of actors was paid to "protest" an environmentalist-backed land deal in South Florida.

We see, let's just call it extrinsically motivated individuals attend political events all the time, and on the left and right, but usually those people are paid organizers or canvassers and they constitute a small portion of the crowd. Paying actors to show up, who may be indifferent or even opposed to the issue at hand, is on a totally different level.

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2015.