'AMERICAN OVERTHROW' - A Book Review
Russia watcher and author Keir Giles upcoming book, American Overthrow, is a devastating document of US destruction and what the future looks like if people continue to remain passive
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“Anybody that wondered how they might conduct themselves during the rise of Nazism in Germany can experience that directly in the United States as the ruling elite conducts its authoritarian takeover in real time.”—Keir Giles, American Overthrow
Most days, I feel like I’m standing on the shore of a massive ocean trying to stop the waves of lies from crashing all around.
But because I don’t do this work alone, I wake up each day, prepared to do battle.
Few voices have been as consistent and willing to point to Russia as ground zero for our troubles as Keir Giles, who I befriended on Twitter in 2019, when I was sent his 2016 NATO Defense College Handbook on Russian Information Warfare.
With his calm and reasoned approach, he is able to dissect fact from fiction and then relay his findings clearly and succinctly. He has written multiple books on Russia’s war on everybody, including one that is even titled Russia’s War On Everybody, and he has always looked to the future on what could happen if Russia was not stopped.
Well... Russia was not stopped.
In his latest book, American Overthrow: Moscow’s Endgame In Its Long War with Washington, the clue to what happened is in the title.
As I wrote in the intro to Part 2 of my Q&A with him:
Amidst all the noise, emerges the first meticulous, clear-eyed account of how America was killed.
America did not make it to its 250th birthday. It’s something else now, something sinister and worse. Whether or not some semblance of democratic order can be restored depends entirely on what people do or do not do.
As Keir documents in American Overthrow, which focuses on the actions and events of the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, there’s a grim resemblance to what happened in Russia at the turn of the century.
Not only does he identify all the ways in which the Trump regime is brutal and destructive, but he documents the ways in which Trump is actually copying Russia — attacking its neighbors, committing war crimes, mangling truth, reality, and history, replacing public servants with loyalists, sending masked paramilitaries to terrorize the population, and methodically removing any challenges to his power — in exactly the same way as Putin did. Keir calls this a “defining feature of Trump’s second presidency.”
By documenting America’s shocking transformation through what he calls “the prism of Kremlinology,” we can see the enormity of the destruction far more clearly.
What surprised even him, was how much Trump is surpassing Moscow in its overt corruption, theft, and speed of destruction.
From Part 2 of my Q&A with him in June:
“When looking at the parallels with Russia, it’s not just mimicked Russia, it’s exceeded Russia. The North Korea style praise sessions, where everybody in the cabinet goes around and makes ridiculous compliments to Trump, is something that Putin would never put up with because it’s over the top.
The leader’s face on the front of the Department of Justice. You wouldn’t see that in Russia, but you would in North Korea. And the ways in which there is no attempt to conceal the illegal actions within the United States, as opposed to Russia, which pretends it’s a democracy, pretends to legitimate leadership, pretends it isn’t a kleptocracy. In the United States, it’s all in the open.
Russia is still called an oligarchy, but that’s a little misleading, because the few, the oligarchy of the few, the ultra wealthy, they don’t have the influence on the direction of the country. They don’t rule in the way that the word oligarchy suggests. Whereas in the United States, yes, the billionaires have political sway. They can make things happen. They can influence the leader to deliver policies that they want. So, the United States is already far better at fulfilling the definition of an oligarchy than, in fact, Russia is.”
When I read a book, often history and first-hand accounts by journalists of key events, I have an army of highlighters so when I am ready to report my findings to Bette Dangerous I’ve already worked out key narratives.
That’s impossible for American Overthrow, because I highlighted nearly the entire book.
Part of that was therapy — as Keir told me when I started reading it: “None of this should be surprising. This is stuff you already know.”
But the difference was, it was all laid out together, brick by brick, undeniable, all these events happened, and here they are in living gray.
So by highlighting each passage I was reaffirming to myself the reality of events.
As Keir told me four years ago: “‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ was really effective propaganda.”
Those of us who never deviated from the fact that Russia is at war with the West have been served every form of whataboutism — a Soviet propaganda technique of making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue to change the subject — and over time, it does a number on your head.
But American Overthrow is definitive.
Former US National Security Advisor, Fiona Hill, wrote: “As Keir Giles makes abundantly clear in this expertly written and insightful book, Donald Trump’s political template is Vladimir Putin’s.”
The same Fiona Hill who identified that Elon Musk was passing messages for Putin.
American Overthrow
Keir opens the book with a beautiful dedication:
“This book is dedicated to all those Americans, whether in government, the military, or ordinary citizens, who are doing their best every day to hold the line.”
My first highlight appears on page three (it took me three pages to get my sea legs):
“Trump achieved in a year what Soviet and then Russian political agitation had failed to do over decades: to turn European public opinion firmly against the United States and destroy trust in America as a guarantor of security.”
He opens with an introduction that identifies how swiftly Trump and Elon Musk “dismantled or gutted one government institution after another,” finding it difficult to “identify a single department of the federal government that was not targeted”, “eviscerated” or “transformed from apolitical” to “directly implementing Trump’s orders.”
He notes that in all the chaos, what defines the “destructive actions” is how they harm America, Americans, and “aid America’s adversaries, first among them Russia.”
Make It Make Sense
Keir quotes Justin Trudeau. Just six weeks into Trump’s second presidency, when he addressed Canadians in March 2025, the former Prime Minister asked Americans to “make it make sense.”
The answer is clear: it was the destruction of the United States.
In a dozen chapters, Keir documents the “fire ax” used in this demolition blitzkrieg and how the actions benefit Moscow, with Trump’s attempt at coercing Ukraine to surrender to Russia one of the most obvious examples.
From each destructive action, he draws lines to how US adversaries, primarily Russia and China, clearly benefit.
“Trump’s crash programme of state capture was transforming not just America’s relationship with Europe, but the country itself,” he writes.
He continues: “The war on facts and truth, masked paramilitaries operating with impunity, threats against neighbouring countries, consolidation of power in the hands of a tiny self-serving elite, and government for the profit of a narrow circle of oligarchs all mirror Vladimir Putin’s Russia of twenty-five years before. In Russia, the same processes described in this book took place gradually, so that only those watching closely were fully aware of what was changing… By contrast the United States under Trump has moved so fast in the same direction that in some respects it has already matched or even overtaken Russia.”
Keir calls this out as an “authoritarian takeover speed run.”
Suppression of Actual Truth
Even Trump’s “toy media outlet, Truth Social, bears the same name as the former organ of the Soviet Communist Party, Pravda (Truth),” writes Keir.
He loads up the introduction with some phenomenal historic quotes that foreshadow our current troubles. One, from an American diplomat from 1946, George Kennan, who wrote of Moscow’s ongoing hostile intent, that the greatest danger when facing the long-term challenge of Russia is “that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
In that respect, the US has already fallen victim.
It appears to be in the mafia state phase, Keir adds, quoting Russia-watcher Ruth Deyermond, who notes that the second Trump administration is “looking like mid-late period Yeltsin.”
The brilliance of each of Keir’s books is that he is not an academic and does not write for academics. He makes “a set of observations” that “tragically, grimly” are familiar in history.
The heartache begins early, when he writes that the “US has decisively stepped away from aspiring to be a force for good, that stands apart from autocracies and dictatorships, and instead of confronting the Russian model of statecraft now seeks to emulate it.”
In American Overthrow, Keir offers a level of detail that describes the totality of what is happening.
That is something we can’t get from the news, which pumps out punishing headline after headline, flooding our minds with the relevant, irrelevant, and often, the irrational.
French thinker Francois Heisbourg calls what’s happening in America a “kind of assisted suicide,” hurried along by China and Russia.
Keir asks you to look at the totality and not the fragmentation, as he writes:
“It is hard to overstate the depth or speed of change in the United States. Media reporting focuses on discrete issues without bringing them together into a coherent picture. But military patrols in US cities, police raids on homes of government critics, mass detentions without due process, the suppression of the media and rights to free expression, masked paramilitaries enjoying impunity for committing murder on the streets, convicted criminals released because the victims of their violence were the President’s enemies, and the evisceration of America’s defences against terrorism, extremism and disease are part of a whole rather than disconnected phenomena.”
Surprisingly Flimsy Guardrails
Installing a Russia-friendly leadership group in power comes down to the fact that the US had “surprisingly flimsy guardrails” — subversion from within was easy when you had no protection and ample denial it was even happening.
As you read the book, he asks you to bear one question in mind: if one or more of the Trump administration “were consciously working for Russia, and their real objective were to hasten the decline of the United States and its global power, what would they have done differently?”
As he describes the long war between Russia and America, he begins with the confrontation between the “American emphasis on individual freedoms and the Russian notion of universal subservience to the state.”
In the Cold War, this meant challenges through proxy wars and ideological subversion. Avoiding direct confrontation, “Russia’s intelligence services focused on undermining American institutions, social cohesion, and governance.”
Those of us who spent the past decade studying how this works and warning about how well it was working, may feel a kind of catharsis reading his words. The US has been a target nation of long-term psychological warfare to destroy us from within, and the fact that a hot mind war is being waged throughout Europe should be obvious.
Cue up the migrant caravans.
The US is what can happen when a population stops defending its democracy, when it allows foreign invaders to weaken trust in institutions by mangling reality — suddenly democracy becomes the enemy and not Russia.
The rise of conspiracy is no accident, but an important primer to reduce trust in government. Trump posting an image of himself with an alien on 17 May 2026 is the apex of this.
Early in the book, Keir makes the important point that “America’s divisions were not invented by Russia, but Moscow has found them to be a vital weapon with which to attack its enemy.”
Paralysis is induced by “making “victims unsure what if anything can be true,” with both Russia and Trump aligned in the mass destruction of truth.
Keir notes that the Iran war presented an economic lifeline to Moscow, as the US unsanctioned Russian oil. And as the price of eggs went up, the US began importing Russian eggs. Keir offers examples of those pardoned and rewarded by Trump who were working with Russian intelligence against the US — Alexander Smirnov, the fabricator of Hunter Biden conspiracies, and Lauren Chen, the founder of Tenet Media, covertly Russian-funded in exchange for promoting Russian narratives to US audiences. Trump’s DOJ released Smirnov from prison just six-months into his six year sentence, and Chen was rewarded with a new visa to re-enter the US and even received an invite to spend Easter 2026 at the White House.
Nice Little Putin Romance
Keir takes us back in time to 2016, reminding us the #TrumpWon hashtag on Twitter originated in St Petersburg, and recites a litany of data points as a refresher on how Trump worked towards Moscow’s “preferred outcomes on every available issue.”
He writes:
“While there have been persistent allegations by former Soviet intelligence officers that Trump was a long-standing agent for the KGB, with the code name Krasnov, most of these claims do not specify whether Trump was a conscious and active recruit or merely a person whom the KGB sought to exploit. Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has stated plainly that Trump is ‘objectively, a Soviet or Russian asset.’”
While it may be difficult within the US to grasp the totality of Trump’s destruction in his first year in office, a poll from the EU that Keir cites shows that Europeans are increasingly aware.
“Before 2025, when international polls asked people globally where they could move to if they could, the consistent top answer by a long margin would always be the United States. America’s appeal derived not only from its prosperity, but also from its freedom and democratic values. Today, that image of the United States has collapsed. The change is particularly dramatic in the European Union. A Politico poll in April 2026 found that three times more EU citizens see the US as a threat than as an ally, with Washington regarded as a greater threat than Beijing in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany.”
By April 2026, almost two-thirds of the countries around the world had no US ambassador, and assignments that had been made since 2025 were to Trump loyalists, giving China an open field, he writes. Same for US media cuts globally and cuts to USAID, all opportunities for China and Russia to step in to vacated American soft power.
It’s hard to overstate the damage done to US institutions by the propagandists Trump assigned in each position. “Targeted purges and indiscriminate sackings” eliminated expertise throughout government.
US governmental agencies are under sustained attack from Trump and his loyalists, who then turned their federal might on US cities, something very familiar from history and authoritarian regimes.
“I have the right to do anything I want to do.”—Donald Trump
And thanks to the judicial coup, Trump believes he is above the law, despite judges repeatedly finding his actions illegal.
“Organised extrajudicial murder by the armed forces was previously a hallmark of Russia and other authoritarian aggressors, rather than of the United States,” writes Keir, who reminds us of the lethal strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that began in September 2025, resulting in at least 180 extrajudicial killings to date.
That, of course, preceded Trump’s public threat that Iran’s “civilization will die tonight” if it did not comply with US demands.
The kill-threat, the boat killings, all blatant war crimes, made more clear by my recent visit to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, currently under attack by Trump and his loyalists.
As you’re reminded of the damage to the US military with a TV talk show host in charge, and the damage to the nation’s health with a conspiracy peddler in charge, and the damage to US intelligence with a cultist in charge, the totality of destruction comes into sharper focus.
When Keir reminds us of the Greenland campaign, the Russian methods are easily spotted.
Separatism! Annexation! Save Greenlanders from Danish Oppression!
I am momentarily uplifted when he notes that the Greenland lesson reveals “the appropriate response to Trump threats was to demonstrate resolve and face them down.”
There’s a lesson there for resistance.
But as Keir noted in Part 1 of our Q&A, he is concerned by what he sees as an “extraordinary passivity” particularly among Democrat politicians.
In American Overthrow, he claims that “some external observers attribute the dearth of visible resistance to the transformation under way in the United States not only to the fear of repression, but also to a failure to grasp the enormity of the changes—or reluctance to recognise and acknowledge them.”
He quotes disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, who was hired to lead the Disinformation Governance Board under Biden, whose administration buckled and withdrew support when she was attacked, threatened and vilified:
“Burying your head in the sand today will not save you or your future career… by the time you choose to fight, you might be standing over the smoldering ruins of the US government. What about your career prospects then?”
It’s a fair question, and one that I hope prompts a soul check.
As he shows how Trump is exceeding North Korea by putting his glowering face everywhere, he pointed out how an “American humourist” suggested “it was about six months before Trump would print his face on his own face.”
In a section of the book, with the subhead, “Corruption, Russian Style,” Keir writes: “Trump has monetised his position as president in a manner that would previously have been unconscionable in the United States, although normal for Russia.”
Trump has faced no consequences, he notes, and has “benefited from functioning in an ethical vacuum.”
“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”
That quote, from Trump, explains his deviation from norms.
As his sons follow the autocratic offspring enrichment pattern, so do those close to him — the clown show a distraction front for high-level corruption, made to appear normal and natural, like in Russia.
Around the point of corruption — diverting state funds, extorting money from corporations, his “coin-operated pardons machine” — Keir has a difficult time understanding why Trump’s behavior is triggering so little outrage in the US, particularly as his government has become a “refuge for criminals.”
Gold and Flattery
Even “reputable” CEOs show up with gifts of gold looking for tariff exemptions, and the donors to Trump’s “ballroom” miraculously received billions of dollars in federal contracts.
Royalty payments made their way to the Trump family — estimates range from $40 to $75 million – for the Amazon “Melania” hagiography that few even saw.
The “normalization of unethical practices” under Trump appears infinite — the Board of Peace, anyone? And here again, we say, “just like Russia.”
“Trump and his inner circle are rapidly creating an American replica of krugovaya poruka, a system that relies on maintaining its essential figurehead at the top of the pyramid, without which everybody risks going to jail.”—Keir Giles, American Overthrow
Performative Inhumanity
Chapter 6, Autocracy In the USA, is a blur of highlighted passages — I scan it quickly rather than having to read it again, because it’s a brutal reminder of each action taken to march America toward totalitarianism — including retribution against perceived enemies and ICE’s “performative inhumanity,” causing writer Masha Gessen to note that “state terror has arrived.”
Keir recalls writing in his previous book, Who Will Defend Europe, how we “can now understand what our great grandparents experienced when they watched the drift toward conflict in Europe in the late 1930s.”
“Anybody that wondered how they might conduct themselves during the rise of Nazism in Germany can experience that directly in the United States as the ruling elite conducts its authoritarian takeover in real time.”—Keir Giles, American Overthrow
As Keir compares fact checking to “catching snowflakes in a blizzard,” because “the speed at which the lies come tumbling over each other leaves anybody trying to follow and disentangle them disoriented and unable to keep up,” I finally understand for the first time why autocrats lie so often and without shame.
It’s a demonstration of power.
The US Constitution was not designed to cope with a challenge like Trump, the damage to America has been deep and will be hard to undo, Keir writes.
The facts he outlines on concerted election threats is sobering, and people should be prepared rather than surprised by staged attacks Trump might arrange to try to remain in power.
He does not end the book with any conjured optimism.
“As I have discovered with each of my previous books, artificially-inserted optimism is a shortcut to false predictions.”—Keir Giles, American Overthrow
But as I round out this review, I realize that what Keir has done is offer a comprehensive document of Trump’s unbridled criminality. And if history is to offer any suggestions, one may be that each of his loyalists also risk an encounter with international law. Trump and his loyalists are trying to kill international law, but it is, in fact, still alive.
I think of the “gravediggers” of Hitler’s inner circle and how they ended up.
I often think of that.
I think of how a French general who evacuated to England in 1940 refused to consider defeat, even after Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had fallen, and even after Germans had entered Paris unopposed.
“Believe me,” said General Charles de Gaulle in a radio broadcast on 18 June 1940. “I speak to you with full knowledge of the facts and tell you that nothing is lost in France… Has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!”
And France was restored — with substantial help from the United States.
Today, I think often of Europe and its late awakening.
“For some in Europe, both Russia and the US now represent what the West came together to overcome: imperialism and authoritarianism under-pinned by unbridled aggression,” writes Keir.
The only remaining questions I have: will Europe defend itself from a similar fate and will Americans surprise Keir?
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KEIR GILES has advised governments worldwide on the Russian threat. A former senior fellow with Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, he regularly comments for the BBC and international media. His prescient books include Who Will Defend Europe?, a Financial Times Politics Book of the Year.
More about American Overthrow:
AMERICAN OVERTHROW — HAS RUSSIA BROUGHT ABOUT REGIME CHANGE IN THE USA? The maelstrom following Donald Trump’s 2025 return to the US presidency left many bemused and disoriented. But for Russia-watchers, what unfolded was grimly familiar. So many of the Trump administration’s destructive actions have precisely aligned with the Kremlin’s own objectives; and to a startling extent, Trump’s America is beginning to mimic Russia itself.
Abroad, Trump has demanded the annexation of neighbours, and embraced war crimes in Iran and the Caribbean. At home, the war on truth and history, purges and the weaponisation of justice, the deployment of masked federal paramilitaries to the streets of major cities and more all mirror Vladimir Putin’s own consolidation of power. Dismantling obstacles to Russia’s ambitions, whether they threaten Europe or America itself, is a defining feature of Trump’s second presidency. And just like Putin, Trump shows no intention of departing at the end of his presidential term. Keir Giles examines America’s transformation through the prism of Kremlinology. What he reveals should alarm us all.
Quotes on American Overthrow:
‘Keir Giles draws direct parallels between the Trump oligarchy’s consolidation of power in the United States and Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. This is not a bizarre or far-fetched comparison, and it should make readers of all political persuasions think twice about American politics.’—ANNE APPLEBAUM, author of Autocracy, Inc.
‘As Keir Giles makes abundantly clear in this expertly written and insightful book, Donald Trump’s political template is Vladimir Putin’s.’—FIONA HILL, former US National Security Council advisor
‘Giles highlights Kremlin method in Trump’s madness. A must-read.’—EDWARD LUCAS, former senior editor, The Economist
‘A meticulous forensic examination of how the Trump administration’s objectives precisely match those of the Kremlin.’—TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES, former president of Estonia
‘For the last decade, I’ve chronicled how Moscow cultivated Donald Trump as an intelligence asset. In American Overthrow, Keir Giles—a Russia specialist at Chatham House—takes that story into the second Trump administration, where the payoff for Russia is finally revealed.
By assembling the scattered scandals of the Trump era into a single, coherent, and chilling whole, Giles does what the daily flood of headlines cannot: he shows how Trump doesn’t merely emulate Russia but often outdoes it—creating his own set of “alternative facts,” activating masked paramilitaries, threatening neighboring allies, and consolidating power in the hands of his billionaire friends.
The picture that emerges—a fractured Europe, a hobbled NATO, a White House at war with its own intelligence agencies—amounts to dividends beyond Putin’s wildest dreams. This is the rare book that says exactly what has happened: Russia has effected regime change in the United States with the active support of millions of Americans—and most of them still don’t even know it.’—CRAIG UNGER, author of House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat.
To pre-order American Overthrow (Hurst Publishers), follow this link or click this button:
American Overthrow worldwide publishing dates:
September 3, UK and Europe
November 15; Available for purchase October 15
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Is Trump actually in charge. He is clearly unhinged, certifiable even. Does he have the mental capacity to actually do all these things or is someone else doing it for him?