Norm Eisen’s Democracy Playbook 2025 is a 178-page operations manual for using color-revolution tactics to obstruct, destabilize, and ultimately remove an elected government. Eisen is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. On October 29, 2025, former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin (D) delivered a Brookings keynote specifically addressing “domestic deployments and national security.” Less than three weeks later, Slotkin released a coordinated seditious video with Mark Kelly and four other Democratic lawmakers addressing military and intelligence personnel directly and urging them to refuse orders, putting our country at great risk. Eisen’s playbook openly recommends tactics that, if foreign governments deployed to influence an American election or secretly directed through American proxies as he explicitly asks them to do, would violate federal election law and FARA. Yet he carefully presents them as “democracy assistance” and general civil resistance. It declares America a “backsliding democracy” and argues that tactics previously deployed against foreign governments now have “important potential U.S. applications.” Its instructions are remarkably direct. Opposition groups are told to “forcefully contest each individual” government action through courts and legislatures, impeachment, recall campaigns, protests, strikes, and boycotts. They are urged to build “transnational networks” with foreign organizations and governments, then work with “external allies” to pressure the targeted administration. Foreign donors are instructed to finance local NGOs, develop activist networks, train organizers in “strategic nonviolent action,” provide technology and secure meeting spaces, support friendly media, attend protests and trials, and pressure governments to “enact changes or step down.” Most revealingly, the playbook tells outside donors to avoid the appearance that domestic political activities are “externally driven.” It explains how journalists should be “sensitized” to resistance movements, how activists should be trained as media spokespeople, and how social-media companies should ensure opposition messages “get through.” The model presented is Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Eisen’s playbook praises years of foreign support from USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and other organizations. It describes foreign grants to activist groups, foreign training for organizers, embassy funding for media outlets and exit polls, and diplomats physically intervening to protect opposition activists. The legal strategy is equally revealing. The book discusses using artificial intelligence and data to identify which judges and jurisdictions are most receptive to particular arguments. In plain English, technologically assisted judge and venue shopping. Create an opposition coalition. Weaponize the courts. Mobilize protests, strikes, and boycotts. Recruit NGOs and sympathetic media. Secure foreign funding and training. Pressure technology companies. Conceal the appearance of foreign direction. Apply relentless pressure until the elected government “enact[s] changes or step[s] down.” This is the same Norm Eisen who appears endlessly on television presenting himself as a neutral defender of American institutions. They call it “defending democracy.” Everywhere else in the world, it is called regime change and he would be in prison for treason.