A new book, Survival - Democracy's Struggle To Survive, written by bestselling author Elizabeth Graham and eight of the country's leading experts on Donald Trump, reveals what the authors describe as the hidden history of Trump's relationship with Russia and Russia's ongoing covert campaign to weaken the United States from within. The book is available at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Elizabeth-Graham/author/B0CMY189NT.
Graham teamed with Craig Unger, David Andelman, Charles Sykes, Steven Beschloss, Dr. Bandy Lee, George A. Polisner, and Mersault. According to the announcement, Survival will likely be remembered as one of the most informative works ever produced on the Trump/Russia connection and on why the public must understand what is happening behind the scenes of the American electoral process.
The book argues that as the Soviet Union collapsed one nation at a time, Putin and his KGB colleagues emerged from the wreckage in 1992. Recognizing that Russia's military strength had sharply declined and could not defeat the United States directly, they turned to what the authors call Russia's greatest strength: a deeply covert campaign to weaken America from within. By the turn of the millennium, the CIA faced a crisis. Believing the Cold War was over and its mission complete, the agency shut down more than thirty overseas intelligence operations and reduced its Russian specialists by over 25%, exposing critical U.S. capabilities. Presidents Bush and Clinton, along with much of the American public, no longer viewed Russia as an enemy. Yet, like a modern Trojan Horse, Russia only appeared to retreat as elite KGB/FSB operatives infiltrated American society, including what the authors describe as the entanglement of a narcissistic American man who loved money and women more than integrity. The trap was set.
Putin's efforts to undermine democracy quietly influenced every aspect of American government, politics, and daily life, the book contends. Many Americans and media outlets overlooked this omnipresent interference, largely because they are convinced Trump is not aligned with Putin, a critical delusion the authors say is held despite conclusive evidence. Craig Unger, an award-winning New York Times bestselling author of six books, co-author of Survival, and a political analyst, has performed comprehensive research on Trump and Russia. The announcement states that Unger has proved, without doubt and by providing solid evidence, that Trump is owned by Putin and Russia. Dr. Bandy Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist, New York Times bestselling author, co-author of Survival, and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, accurately predicted the severity and timing of the nation's decline if a dangerously unfit president remained in office.
Graham said few Americans have observed the sweeping changes in the United States over the past decade as closely as she has or understood their corrosive connection to the evolution of Russian politics and government since the Gorbachev era. She was living in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed and witnessed the disbelief of thousands of Russians, as ordinary citizens endured joblessness, food shortages, inadequate medical care, and unpaid pensions and salaries. Those early Yeltsin years were chaotic, leaving many Russians longing for the familiar stability of communism, and Putin and the KGB capitalized on that volatility with a perilous, reticent rise to power, she said.
Survival describes democracy's struggle to survive. It is intended as a comparative assessment, an inspiration, and an intriguing collection of Substack messages written by some of the best-known, best-informed, and New York Times bestselling nonfiction authors of the last decade. It concludes that the sovereign nation of Ukraine and American democracy face a common enemy. The key difference is that while Ukrainians endure daily bombing, infrastructure destruction, and death, Americans are largely uninformed or in denial about their adversary. What they do see, according to the announcement, includes increasing prices at the pump, about a 50% jump in one year; the loss of health care for ten million Americans in 2026; contaminated foods including milk, eggs, meat, and vegetables; an endless war costing nearly $2 billion per day that is depleting weapons, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to outside attacks, and increasing the national debt; grocery store closures and grocery product price increases up to 40%; restaurants closing, with Wendy's and Village Inn announcing closures; massive discrimination, bigotry, and deaths through ICE and the closure of USAID, with an estimated 22 million preventable deaths projected by 2030 in Africa, mostly children, according to The Lancet; an assault on elections and voting procedures, including sixty polling sites in Georgia that received bomb threats in 2024, all traced to Russian IP addresses, with similar threats in several other states; and fires, arson, and bombings, including a South Carolina Circuit Court judge's house burning down after she refused to give Trump's DOJ her state's voter registration, and a catastrophic explosion on Oct. 10, 2025, at the Accurate Energetic Systems munitions facility in Tennessee that killed 16 employees inside. That plant shipped munitions to Ukraine.
Like the roots of the tree on the cover of Survival, where slender fingers extend through the soil for nourishment to sustain its life, the United States must draw renewed strength from its own roots: the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, the authors conclude.
