Norm Eisen's Perfectly Legal Color Revolution Against Trump

Was there a coup? That question, when asked in the context of American politics, invites ridicule from respectable quarters. Yet when the subject turns to foreign regimes, that same question is treated with analytic seriousness. Political scientists pore over cases from Georgia to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Egypt, cataloguing the hallmarks of so-called "color revolutions", soft regime-change efforts executed through legal, media, and civic levers, rather than military ones. Oddly, however, the moment one notices similar tactics deployed on American soil, the conversation ends.

That silence deserves scrutiny. For there is a credible case that the 2020 effort to remove President Donald Trump from power bore the unmistakable traits of a color revolution. This was not a spontaneous mass rejection of a rogue leader, but a carefully constructed campaign led by a cadre of political professionals steeped in the tactics of regime destabilization. And at the center of it stood Norm Eisen, a lawyer, diplomat, and longtime Democratic operative whose fingerprints appear on nearly every front of the anti-Trump operation: legal warfare, media manipulation, protest orchestration, and institutional capture. If 2020 offered a credible case, 2025 has made it undeniable. Eisen is no longer merely borrowing the methods of color revolutions, he is actively conducting one in real time. His lawfare against Trump has not abated with the ballot box but has intensified since Trump's return to the White House, making clear that Eisen’s goal is not just to win elections, but to delegitimize and destroy Trump through extra-electoral means.

Eisen co-authored "The Democracy Playbook," a Brookings Institution manual ostensibly intended to help civil society resist authoritarian backsliding abroad. Yet its most striking application occurred at home. The tactics recommended in the Playbook, mass mobilization, narrative framing, elite consensus building, and legal contestation, were repurposed to target a sitting US president. The irony would be comic if it weren’t so grave.

Critics of the color revolution thesis may object: Trump was impeached, indicted, and defeated according to law. But this defense misses the point. Color revolutions are not coups in the classical sense. They are legalistic coups, procedurally cloaked operations that exploit democratic institutions to engineer preordained outcomes. They rely on appearances, not substance. The letter of the law is followed, while its spirit is hollowed out.

That Eisen was at the helm of this effort is no coincidence. He has made a career of weaponizing process. As co-founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), he transformed a nominal ethics watchdog into a partisan wrecking ball. Under his guidance, CREW filed well over one hundred lawsuits against Trump and his associates, often on speculative or novel legal theories. Few resulted in conviction or judgment. But that was never the point. The goal was attrition.

The impeachment of Trump in 2019 bears Eisen’s signature as well. Long before the phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky came to light, Eisen had already drafted multiple articles of impeachment against Trump, awaiting only a triggering incident. This reversal of the usual logic, where one discovers a crime and then drafts charges, reveals much. For Eisen, law is not a constraint, but a canvas. It is an instrument of political design.

Yet lawsuits and impeachments were only one front. Equally important was the campaign to delegitimize Trump before, during, and after the 2020 election. Here, Eisen’s involvement in the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) deserves close attention. The project, held in mid-2020, staged "war games" of various election scenarios. In each, Trump was cast as a would-be usurper, refusing to leave office. The exercises proposed extreme responses: pressuring states to ignore the popular vote, encouraging military defiance, and coordinating mass protests.

These were not idle speculations. They were strategic rehearsals. And when the moment came, the script was followed with eerie fidelity. Trump’s legal challenges to election procedures were instantly framed as democratic sabotage. Big Tech began censoring dissenting voices, precisely as TIP had advised. Street protests were mobilized under slogans like "Count Every Vote," drawing on the same activist infrastructure long supported by Eisen-linked NGOs. The effect was to construct an epistemic reality in which Trump’s defeat was both inevitable and morally necessary.

Some defenders of Eisen’s efforts insist that no laws were broken. This may be true. The legal analysis is clear: US statutes concerning rebellion, sedition, and government overthrow, such as 18 U.S.C. § 2385, apply only where force or violence is used. Eisen was careful to stay within the bounds of nonviolence. But legality does not entail legitimacy. A color revolution does not require tanks in the street. It requires only the sustained and coordinated manipulation of legal norms, public narratives, and institutional power.

Eisen’s defenders also emphasize that he acted out of a sincere desire to protect democracy. Yet this claim, too, warrants skepticism. Eisen has openly admitted to deploying his foreign regime-change expertise domestically. During his ambassadorship in Prague, he worked on anti-corruption reforms designed to weaken illiberal governments. His subsequent work in American politics followed an eerily similar pattern: frame the target as illegitimate, isolate them institutionally, and litigate them into paralysis. The techniques remained constant. Only the theater changed.

Moreover, Eisen’s ties to the judiciary raise further concerns. He has boasted of his close friendship with Chief Justice John Roberts, even recounting personal stays together in Europe including a week long stay at the ambassador's residence in Prague, the optics are troubling. Roberts presided over the Trump impeachment trial in which Eisen served as counsel for the prosecution, and critics have noted that he refused to safeguard Trump’s due process rights during the proceedings. No witnesses were permitted to be cross-examined in the House phase, and Roberts allowed the Senate to proceed on terms many legal scholars deemed prejudicial. Some conservatives argue that Roberts’ failure to intervene stemmed not from constitutional restraint but from personal antipathy toward Trump, antipathy that Eisen himself has insinuated in public statements and no doubt in private meetings with Roberts. According to Eisen, both Roberts and even some Trump-appointed justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, "dislike Trump and want to block his administration." At minimum, this relationship casts doubt on the impartiality of the process. At worst, it suggests a quiet collusion among elites, under the veneer of legality, to restrain an elected outsider.

The war did not end in 2020. Even after Trump left office, Eisen continued to prosecute the campaign. CREW filed a novel 14th Amendment challenge to bar Trump from the 2024 ballot. When that effort failed before a unanimous Supreme Court, Eisen’s network pivoted to criminal law. His advocacy groups filed amicus briefs in nearly every Trump-related prosecution: the Manhattan business records case, the federal documents case, and the Georgia RICO case. In each, Eisen and his allies urged courts to accelerate proceedings, deny delays, and expand liability.

More troubling still was Eisen’s attack on Trump’s legal team. Working with groups like The 65 Project, he filed ethics complaints and bar grievances against as many as 400 conservative lawyers, aiming to disbar them or chill their participation. This tactic, targeting not only the man, but his defenders, is rare in American history. Its only parallel lies in authoritarian states where political dissidents are deprived of counsel. The cumulative effect was to isolate Trump within the legal system, denying him equal access to defense. Just as significantly, it had the collateral effect of reducing the number of lawyers willing to litigate or object to irregularities and potential fraud in the 2020, 2022, and 2024 election processes. When attorneys face professional ruin merely for representing unpopular clients or causes, the adversarial legal system ceases to function properly. By silencing defenders, Eisen’s campaign effectively preempted legal resistance, narrowing the field of permissible challenge before it could even be voiced.

Was it effective? Undeniably. Trump spent much of 2024 entangled in four criminal trials across multiple jurisdictions. His resources were diverted, his campaign impeded, and his reputation tainted. Whether guilty or not, the process became the punishment. The net result was precisely what Eisen’s Democracy Playbook recommends: weaken the populist leader through overlapping legal, institutional, and informational constraints.

Some may argue that Trump invited this response through his rhetoric and behavior. But this argument concedes the underlying point: the removal of Trump was not a neutral consequence of democratic process. It was an objective pursued through an integrated campaign of lawfare, narrative control, protest pressure, and elite coordination. In other words, a color revolution.

That such an operation can unfold within the United States is deeply unsettling. The republic depends not just on elections, but on trust in the impartiality of institutions. When those institutions are hijacked by activists with regime-change agendas, democracy is not defended. It is replaced. If norms and rules are bent to remove a disfavored president today, they can be bent again tomorrow, perhaps by the other side.

Norm Eisen is entitled to his views. He is entitled to advocate for policies, to file lawsuits, to speak his mind. What he is not entitled to do is cloak regime change in the language of law and democracy while denying the agency of voters. The color revolution model may be legal. It may even be nonviolent. But it is not democratic in any meaningful sense. It is a controlled demolition of consent, orchestrated by elites who claim to speak for the people while bypassing their will. And Eisen's campaign is not over. As of June 2025, he continues to wield lawfare against the sitting administration. Just this week, his organization filed a third bar complaint against Attorney General Pam Bondi, seeking her disbarment. The effort was no trivial gesture. Eisen mobilized seventy former judges and law professors to sign the complaint, a massive legal and public relations undertaking that underscores his ongoing commitment to removing Trump and his closest allies from power. This is not a postscript; it is a sequel. The color revolution, far from concluded, marches on.

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