Recall what Michael Cohen said in his testimony to the House:
I can only warn people, the more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did, blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”
I wish I understood the attraction to an idiot like Trump. But I will never get it. And that’s not to say I can’t understand why people are attracted to fascism and demagogues. But it has always puzzled me as to why people get into cults of personality. And that’s what Trump is more than anything else. His “politics” such as they are, are limited to some desire to “win” whether it’s our enemies, our allies or his political rivals at home. There’s nothing of substance beyond that. The ecstatic love for him has no meaning beyond an overwhelming personal attachment and love for the group that has attached itself to him. That’s a cult.
Like Michael Cohen before him, another Trump henchman, Lev Parnas, has been forcibly detached from the cult by the legal system and it jolted him into awareness of what he got himself into. I have no doubt that he sought to personally profit as well, but that’s part of the Trump cult’s promise, isn’t it? The money is a big part of the deal.
The Washington Post interviewed Parnas and he talked about this aspect of it. It’s fascinating:
In an interview with The Washington Post, he compared himself to someone emerging from a “cult,” with fresh perspective on the dizzying events of the past two years.
“That arrest saved my life,” he said.
Two years ago, Parnas was fending off creditors in obscurity in Boca Raton, Fla. He shot to the tableside of the president’s closest allies and family members with a few well-placed campaign donations, a die-hard loyalty to Trump and some good old-fashioned chutzpah.
Parnas, 47, was born in Ukraine but moved with his family to the United States as a child and grew up in Brooklyn. He told The Post in an interview conducted before his arrest that he got his start in real estate, at one point selling Trump condos for Donald Trump’s father, Fred, and then worked in trading goods with the former Soviet Union before becoming a securities trader. He moved to Florida in the mid-1990s.AD
He barreled into Trump circles with a $50,000 donation to Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party less than a month before the 2016 election. “I was really passionate about the president,” he said last fall before his arrest. “I started really believing that he could really make a change and make it happen.”
“I tell you honestly, I think he’s going to go down as one of the greatest presidents ever, even with all this negativity and everything that’s going on,” he said then. Parnas told MSNBC last week that he was so passionate about Trump that he had photos of him all over his house. After his arrest, he said, his wife was embarrassed because the FBI told her that “I had a shrine to him.”
“I idolized him,” he said. “I mean, I thought he was the savior.”
In his interview with The Post, Parnas said he was able to rise quickly in Trump’s world because he discovered a “kink in the system”: the super PAC, which, unlike a candidate committee, can accept unlimited funds. In May 2018, the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action reported receiving a $325,000 donation from an energy company Parnas and Fruman had recently formed.
Prosecutors have said the money did not come from their fledgling company, which had no business or revenue, but from a private loan Fruman took out against a Miami condo. Giuliani met the two men around the same time, through a lawyer and friend who referred the duo to him, he has said.
Parnas said he sought out the former New York mayor to be a paid pitchman for a company he co-founded called Fraud Guarantee that claimed to shield investors from financial fraud. He arranged for Giuliani to be paid $500,000 by a Long Island lawyer who was an investor in Fraud Guarantee. He assumed their relationship would be a distant one, Parnas said this past week.
Instead, Parnas said, he was shocked and delighted to find himself constantly at the side of the president’s personal lawyer. Before he knew it, Giuliani was inviting him and Fruman to hang out four to five nights a week, he said. They were zipping around the country to attend Trump rallies, and then traveling around Europe to gather information about Ukraine.Giuliani says he’d testify at Trump’s Senate trial, adds that he’d ‘love to try the case’President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani reacted to Trump’s impeachment proceedings on Dec. 31.
There were long nights at exclusive cigar bars and frequent strategy sessions at Trump’s hotel in Washington; a visit to a palace outside Madrid owned by a Venezuelan energy executive; and a huddle at a luxury Parisian club. Parnas joined Giuliani in the dugout to meet the New York Yankees during a special overseas baseball game in London. He accompanied the former New York mayor to a special annual commemoration of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and to the state funeral of former president George H.W. Bush at Washington National Cathedral.
Parnas said living in Giuliani’s world was a heady experience. “I looked up to him. I grew up in New York and he was a legend. And here I was sitting with him, every night,” he said.At night, he would call his wife, Svetlana, and tell her about the powerful people he was meeting with Giuliani and the swanky fundraisers they were attending. “You won’t believe this!” he would exclaim.
Parnas acknowledged that he had ambitions to use the connections he was making through Giuliani to improve his business prospects. He said he grew up in Brighton Beach with little money and an absent father. In recent years, he said, his career had been “up and down.” “Sometimes we were buying Rolexes,” he said. “And sometimes we were selling the Rolexes to make the rent.”
Court filings show he has been dogged by debts. When he met Giuliani, he was being pursued for more than $500,000 in Florida courts by investing in a movie deal gone bad.In his new environs, Parnas said, suddenly anything appeared possible: “I figured, once this is over, we’ll be kings.”
Still, he said, he understood from the start that he and Fruman, who often wore T-shirts paired with gold chains, did not fit in Giuliani’s circle.“No one understood it,” Parnas said of their constant presence by his side. “I didn’t understand it.” But at the time, he said, he believed Giuliani enjoyed their company — and that Giuliani appreciated that the duo were a solicitous entourage, willing to drop anything to join him at his favorite haunts, stay out late while he drank scotch and pick up the tab.
Now Parnas believes that the president’s lawyer drew the two Soviet-born men close after he realized they had connections in Ukraine, a Giuliani obsession. The former New York mayor was convinced Ukrainians had worked against Trump in the 2016 election and were in possession of evidence of Biden’s corruption.
“I think we were recruited,” Parnas said. “It was the perfect storm.”
Maybe Parnas is a very stable genius himself who is playing a very deep game on behalf of some nefarious Deep State players. But I doubt it. That recitation rings true. I can see how someone like him would think he had an in with big players and stood to make a ton of money. And while I will never understand why anyone would idolize Donald Trump it sounds perfectly believable to me that this guy did.
Lev should have listened to Michael Cohen