Bestselling author Elizabeth Graham, an authority on the Trump-Putin relationship, has sounded a dire warning: the United States is succumbing to tyranny and despotism under a leader she calls a traitor controlled by Russia. In a recent Substack post, Graham, who spent nearly two decades in Russia, Central Asia, and Ukraine, wrote that the nation's independence day will be remembered as the time when the country fell to one man with absolute power, controlled by an enemy.
Graham, author of From Democracy To Democrazy: A Warning To All Americans, draws on historical parallels, quoting Roman statesman Cicero: 'A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.' She argues that many Americans doubt Trump is a traitor, echoing Mark Twain's proverb about the danger of believing things that 'just ain't so.'
According to Graham, Republicans are unknowingly persuaded by propaganda techniques used in Russia a century ago. She contends that Trump, a convicted criminal on 34 felony counts for hush-money payments, a sexual predator by legal definition, and guilty of business fraud, is rapidly transforming the government into a Kremlin-style dictatorship. 'America is now led by a convicted criminal and a traitor,' she wrote. 'He daily 'rots the soul of our nation,' and his reign may end only with his demise.'
Graham asserts that Russia, unable to defeat the U.S. militarily, launched a disinformation campaign, and Trump became the KGB's top asset. She cites Oleg Kalugin, a senior KGB operative, who confirmed in an interview with Craig Unger for American Kompromat that Trump was 'wined and dined, and then trapped' during a Moscow visit. Graham's own daughter was a bookkeeper at a Moscow nightclub that provided underage prostitution and where Trump visited and photos were taken.
She links Trump's actions—removing U.S. troops from Germany, closing USAID, undermining NATO—to Putin's wishes, weakening the U.S. financially and politically. The closure of USAID, she notes, could lead to 22 million preventable deaths in Africa by 2030, according to The Lancet and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, calling it a 'deliberate murder of Black people.'
Graham warns that Trump may attempt to stay in power beyond 2028, as Putin has done since 2000. She points to the Capitol attack and ongoing voting disruptions as evidence. Graham's book, praised by Kirkus Reviews as an 'intriguing and informative must read,' is available on Amazon, and her Substack (egraham.substack.com) offers daily insights. More information is at democrazy2020.org.
