Announcing My New Book, How Russia Won, and Asking for Your Help

I need your help...and I have a special offer.

For years, Donald Trump has relentlessly claimed the Trump-Russia scandal was a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” denying that Vladimir Putin mounted information warfare against the United States in 2016 to help him become president. He’s been lying—and covering up the damning fact that his denials aided and abetted the Kremlin operation. Numerous investigations—including Robert Mueller’s inquiry and a Senate Intelligence Committee examination overseen by Sen. Marco Rubio—have concluded the Kremlin interfered in that election to boost Trump.

Yet with his ceaseless whining about “Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump has essentially won the messaging battle. You no longer hear much talk about Putin’s war on American democracy or Trump’s treachery. Not from the Democrats, not from the media. Nothing—even though Putin continued to run covert actions in 2020 and 2024 to assist Trump. That’s right. Putin’s “gray-zone warfare”—as national security experts call it—against the United States has not stopped, and it has benefited Trump.

This crucial story needs telling, and that’s what I’ve done in my new book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, which chronicles how Putin has successfully waged a decade-long clandestine war against the United States—and how Trump has been complicit in this attack on America (which Trump demonstrated once again on Thursday night with his lie-filled speech on election security blaming China, not Russia, for interfering in US elections). The book will be published by HarperCollins on September 15.

Heather Cox Richardson, the author and historian, says How Russia Won is

The definitive account of Putin's gray-zone warfare against the United States and how Trump and his loyalists have abetted that warfare for a decade. “Russia, Russia, Russia” was never a hoax—it has always been the central story of the Trump era. David Corn's highly readable narrative is a vital step toward a long-overdue national reckoning.

Thanks, Heather.

How Russia Won exposes Putin’s secret campaign to subvert and weaken the United States—and shows how Trump, his MAGA movement, the Republican Party, and right-wing media have served as useful idiots for the tyrannical Russian leader in his years-long assault on America and the West. As far as I can tell, no other book connects all the dots and covers this tale of both modern information warfare and profound political betrayal. 

For it to be a success, I need you.

I’m sure you’re accustomed to an author pleading for people to preorder his or her book before its release date. Writing a book will turn even the most self-effacing progressive into a mad-dog capitalist salesperson. After devoting so much time to the project, you desperately want all that hard work to pay off. As in people buying and reading the book. Thus, the desire to run through town, grab strangers by the arm, and beg them to buy your book.

Or to do whatever you can to generate preorders.

Such sales are inordinately important. Booksellers (and their algorithms) rely on preorders to determine how they will handle individual books. Will they order large numbers from a publisher and display big stacks of the book in the front of a store? Will they promote it on a website? Or will they request a small number of books and toss them on a shelf far from the gaze of browsing customers? An online retailer—ok, Amazon—can show you the book when you’re shopping for something else, or it can leave it up to you to stumble across the book amidst its catalogue of millions of volumes. All of this makes a great difference in sales.

That’s why publishers and authors obsess over preorders. It’s all about creating velocity for a book. This also means that early buyers have clout. They hold more influence than those who buy after the official release. They have the potential to help launch a book toward success. You literally can be a trendsetter.

My editor explained a few other benefits of preorders. A reader will receive the book lickety-split, often on the publication date. An early purchaser will help determine how a book is perceived, particularly a book with political content, and this can impact the overall political culture since media commentators and pundits often look to book sales as a political indicator. If conservative books dominate the bestseller list, that is taken as a sign of right-wing energy and enthusiasm. The success of books that challenge the right can shape the larger political cultural battle—and strike a blow for truth and freedom.

All of this is a long way of asking you to consider preordering How Russia Won. Politics and Prose, a great independent bookstore in Washington, DC, is offering signed copies of the book for all preorders. To take advantage of this offer, click here.

And there’s this: I expect the book will receive much pushback from the Trump crowd—and trigger sharp attacks on me. So it would mean a lot to have your support for this project.

How Russia Won, as the promotional copy says, has the verve and twists of a spy novel. The book is full of revelations and dramatic accounts of

* Russian intelligence operations targeting the United States, including the Kremlin’s secret schemes to spread disinformation in 2020 and 2024 to assist Trump’s presidential campaigns.

* Ties between Trump’s inner circle—including his personal attorney and his campaign manager—and Putin’s spies.

* Republican efforts to use Russian disinformation to protect Trump and smear Democrats.

* The bipartisan and little-noticed congressional investigation that blew apart Trump’s claim the Russia investigation was a hoax and raised disturbing questions about Trump’s own interactions with Russians and Russia.

* The never-ending propaganda crusade Trump and MAGA Republicans have pursued to cover up Putin’s clandestine intervention in US politics.

Regular readers of this newsletter will recognize some of the reporting that went into How Russia Won. But as I pursued stories for this book, I was surprised by the bizarre episodes that I dug up. An FBI director receiving a big payment from a Kremlin-connected propagandist. A fugitive ex-Florida cop who fled to Moscow running disinformation operations that misled millions of Americans. Rudy Giuliani colluding with a Russian agent. Trump and his GOP allies spouting falsehoods and Deep State conspiracy theories cooked up and spread by Putin’s own spies and undercover trolls.

Putin’s furtive campaign against the United States has been far more extensive than I realized. It has even included an effort to insert Russian propaganda into AI chatbots widely used in America.

How Russia Won chronicles a deeply troubling reality that many Americans have not accepted: Putin has succeeded in his twilight war against the United States by helping to land in the White House an agent of chaos, disruption, and authoritarianism who has exacerbated divisions within the United States, undermined American democracy, created conflict within the Western alliance, and diminished Washington’s standing across the globe.

Trump has weakened the United States in so many ways—exactly what Putin has desired. And, as I see it, the book provides a chilling account of Trump’s strange relationship with Putin and how both have gotten away with this assault on the United States.

Tim Weiner, the author of The Mission and Legacy of Ashes, calls How Russia Won an “instant classic.” Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols says it is “meticulous and gripping.” And Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc., praises it as “an essential guide to understanding modern America.”

In the weeks ahead, I will be relentlessly promoting the book. Apologies in advance if that annoys anyone. (See the above paragraph about authorial desperation.) But as with movies and much else these days, a book must quickly charge out of the chute, and you get only one chance to do that. Please bear with me and, better yet, help me with a preorder of a signed copy of How Russia Won. You can find more information about the book at HowRussiaWon.com.

The readers of this newsletter are my base. You have the power to make this book a success. Your support was crucial for landing my previous book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, on the bestseller list. Now I need your help once more.

With How Russia Won, I’m trying to reclaim the Trump-Russia narrative, which has been hijacked by Trump and his toadies to pitch the paranoid MAGA fantasy that Trump is the victim of a vast Deep State plot. This is a tough mission. I can’t do it without you.

I look forward to hearing what you think of the book.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

The DCotW judges continue to be dumbfounded by the outright racism that is now accepted within MAGA and GOP ranks. To wit: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) calling for legislation to “remigrate” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and “other foreigners who hate our country.”

Such open expressions of bigotry used to be too much even for Republicans, who had to resort to dog whistles to stir up racial animus. Now they just scream online.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether Trump is dumb or he just believes his supporters are dumb. At an event this week, he patted himself on the back for labeling Democrats “Dumocrats”:

Affordability...that’s a fake word they use…We came up with a good word, too. They’re “Dumocrats.” Dumb. You take the B out. Most people don’t know that “dumb” has a B.

The stupidity hurts.

While Trump didn’t win the contest this week, he did earn a second nomination for the dumbest graphic of the week:

The judges this week debated whether Kevin Hassett, Trump’s chief economic adviser, is delusional or just a liar. Talking to CNBC, he said, “Because President Trump has made law and order a big focus of the big cities, it's much cheaper to buy insurance now because people aren't going to steal your car." That’s an indication, he contended, that “inflation is under control.”

Here’s what the data from Insurify says about car insurance rates over the past six months:

Hassett is not even close.

Jay Clayton, the Manhattan US attorney whom Trump nominated to be director of national intelligence, looked the fool at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, when a simple question was posed to him by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.): Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election? Clayton refused to answer it, while repeatedly saying he was answering it.

If Clayton is confirmed, it will be his job to provide accurate information to the president. But he’s already kowtowing to Trump and his warped fantasies.

As Clayton demonstrated, self-respect is sorely lacking in GOP circles. Slavishly echoing Trump’s nonsense that communism is now a great threat to the US, House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted,

For generations, our nation faced the threat of COMMUNISM overseas. Today, that same EXTREME MARXIST ideology is being championed in our own backyard by the Democratic Party. We REFUSE to let MINI COMMUNIST MAMDANIs take over the greatest nation in the history of the world. House Republicans are READY FOR THIS FIGHT!

And to defend the Trump administration’s request for an additional $350 billion in Pentagon spending, Johnson said, “We live in dangerous times. We’re fighting communism on our own shores.”

This is pure demagoguery. The US is not battling communism “on our own shores.” Moreover, the US military is not supposed to engage in domestic political warfare. It’s disgraceful that the fellow who’s second in the line of presidential succession doesn’t know this.

It was a competitive week. But the judges had little trouble agreeing on the winner: Marc Beckman, senior adviser to First Lady Melania Trump. On Newsmax, he proclaimed:

First Lady Melania Trump is the single most consequential first lady in the history of our nation. You talk about her commitment to children. It’s not just with American kids. It’s kids all over the place…It is fair to argue she's had more impact—substantive impact as it relates to the peace process between Ukraine and Russia by singlehandedly executing on four reunifications between Ukrainian and Russian children and their families. What more substantive has occurred?

Has this guy not heard of Dolley Madison, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, or Hillary Clinton? It’s true that Melania Trump has admirably worked on an initiative that has reunited Ukrainian and Russian children with their families. But the numbers are modest. According to TASS, the Russian news outlet, this program last year aided 158 Russian and Ukrainian children. And this effort is being used as PR cover by Russia, which has been accused of kidnapping an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children during the war. As for caring about “kids all over the place,” an estimated 518,000 children have died due to her husband's decimation of the US Agency for International Development.

Melania Trump is no superstar brokering peace between Russia and Ukraine, and the Trump administration has not been good for children. Cuts to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and food stamps have harmed millions of kids. Melania owes these and other children around the world an apology. For his absurd and false hero-worship of his boss, Beckman earned far more than a participation trophy.

When the history of the Trump era is written in the future—if we still have history—a special place will be reserved for those judges who stood up to the cruel, illegal, and unethical actions of the Trump mob. US District Judge Kathleen Williams in Florida joined this noble band this week when she issued an order blasting the now-defunct $1.8 billion slush fund that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, previously Trump’s personal lawyer, set up to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS. She accused the Justice Department of manipulating the courts to serve Trump’s interests—and that included protecting him and his family from IRS investigations.

She wrote:

Williams sanctioned Trump’s legal team and referred one of his lawyers, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida bar for possible professional discipline. And she directed that her scathing order be sent to the New York State bar, noting that Blanche is a member of the bar—a not-so-subtle suggestion that this organization ought to review Blanche’s actions.

Her order came the same week that Blanche, nominated by Trump to become attorney general, testified at a Senate confirmation hearing. So this is the situation: a Trump crony accused by a federal judge of abusing his Justice Department position to hand Trump $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds to be used for payments to Trump’s political allies has been nominated to be attorney general. That’s the Trump way.

Jody Berger had thoughts about the issue that looked at Victor Marx, the far-right Christian fundamentalist who recently won the GOP gubernatorial primary in Colorado:

If either of us knew someone who started telling stories about cat carcasses, seeing demons, and leading imaginary missions to rescue imaginary women and children, we would get that person help. We would see to it that they were sent to a facility where they couldn't harm themselves or others; where they could get a diagnosis for the mental disorder they were clearly suffering; and receive treatment to slow its roll, if not cure it. And in Colorado, the Republicans take the same dude and make him the candidate? C'mon, that's insane.

Jackie Bergstein wrote in about the Platner debacle in Maine:

Can we speak of the bottomless pit of stupidity given us by the Democrats? The latest example: The Platner campaign. We were told to excuse, overlook, Platner's transgressions as simply “poor judgement from the past.”  The Nazi tattoo was brushed over (the ubiquitous drunken soldier); the treatment of women, merely rough (housing?). I understand the "winning is everything" position here, but must we abandon any moral principle we can still hold to?  The end does not justify the means; Bernie, you, (of all people) let us down!

Martha Mattus suggested we focus more on Trump’s victims than Trump:

Yes, there’s all the grift and the lies and the general level of not caring about anything except his own ego and lining the pockets of himself and his family and his supporters. But what upsets me most is all the innocent people who are going to suffer and, in many cases, die because of Trump’s policies. It started in Trump’s first term, when he treated Covid as a political inconvenience rather than a public health emergency, and it’s only gotten worse. Cutting foreign aid and destroying USAID means a lot more deaths, and the recent Ebola outbreak is just one instance of what happens when medical infrastructure is no longer funded. It’s happening in this country too, as the ongoing measles epidemic illustrates, when the anti-vaccine messages reduce the percentage of those who are immunized, and the cuts to our medical system mean that there are far fewer people to do the contact tracing and isolation that can control the spread of the disease.

There are the invisible victims also, the old and poor and unhoused, who die of the more frequent episodes of excessive heat as Trump and his fossil fuel buddies continue to claim that climate change is a hoax. And now, ending TPS for the Haitians is going to create even worse conditions in a health care system that is already at the edge of catastrophic failure due to too few providers and too many patients. For decades we’ve depended on the best and brightest young people from around the world coming to our country to attend medical colleges and staying here to work, and once the hostility to immigrants that’s central to Trump’s MAGA world view takes full effect, it will be almost impossible to deal with the increasing health care needs of an aging population. 

Several readers responded to the issue that noted that Trump, despite seeming to promise Ukraine Patriot missiles, was still gaga for Putin. Cabot Thunem wrote:

I was also puzzled by Trump’s statement about the Patriot missiles, until I learned that Ukraine is well down the path of being able to produce their own answer to the Patriot system by partnering with European defense firms. It will still take years, maybe. By possibly distracting Ukraine with a promise, my suspicion is that Trump was hoping to convince Ukraine to stop spending resources on developing an EU-based system and simply gear up to start producing Patriots.  That would be a major error because as you pointed out, when Trump talks, he is lying.

Lew Woodward emailed:

Your assessment of the relationship between Trump and Putin continues to be right on target. However, I think Trump is more than a "Putin fanboy." Their personal phone calls are not discussions about ending any wars. I think the calls are for Trump to receive his instructions--what are his marching orders from Putin?  When do I execute or comment on specific situations to forward Putin's agenda? 

Those calls are generally monitored by officials on both sides. Thus, it’s unlikely direct orders are being conveyed. My hunch has long been that Putin doesn't have to give Trump any instructions. Trump’s yearning to be Putin's BFF and his chaos-causing narcissism on their own work to Moscow's advantage.

“Moxie, you don’t seem too excited about my new book.”
“Does it have any dogs in it?”
“Not really. There is a reference to a politician killing a puppy in a microwave.”
“What? Who’d want to buy a book like that?”
“It was Russian disinformation. Not a true story.”
“Those people are diabolical.”
“Yes, they are.”