There are many unflattering descriptions circulating about Chris LaCivita, all of which he himself sees as compliments. He is a Republican brawler, a bloodhound, a ruthless party soldier – all examples from a portrait of the New York Magazine about the political consultant. In it, Donald Trump Junior praised him as a guy “who drops a few bombs on Twitter,” intended as an accolade from the son whose provocations make even his father look like a tame schoolboy.
Now the bomb-thrower is supposed to rescue Trump senior from his campaign slump – and the war metaphors are not entirely inappropriate. The slump has already lasted three and a half weeks since US President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential election campaign. Trump had recently led all the polls against him, and after the failed assassination attempt and frenetic applause at his party convention, he already believed himself to be the election winner. However, the new Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, has since made up the deficit. The race is open again, Trump is on the defensive.
Everyday worries instead of election lies – that is now over
For the nasty phase of the election campaign that is now looming, Trump has brought on board the right advisor, Chris LaCivita. The 58-year-old's entire career is based on running tough campaigns for Republicans in distress. He had long kept his distance from Trump until Susie Wiles, manager for the 2024 election campaign, recommended him. For $30,000 a month, LaCivita has since been trying to make his new boss palatable to the American electorate. First of all, with discipline: Trump should stop lamenting the allegedly stolen 2020 election and instead talk about everyday worries, the rising prices, the high cost of housing, the noticeable immigration.
Discipline now seems to be history, and the chaos of bombings begins. Trump launched racist attacks against Harris. And Chris LaCivita takes on Tim Walz. Harris' number two scores points with the audience as a patriotic Democrat from the country who served as a soldier in the National Guard for 24 years before being elected governor of Minnesota.
He attacks the opponents’ strengths
LaCivita doubts that Walz's military record could help him with independent and conservative voters. He is following his recipe for success: not criticizing his opponent's weaknesses, but attacking their strengths. He followed this strategy in 2004 when he campaigned for George W. Bush against John Kerry.
At the time, LaCivita was responsible for commercials that disparaged Kerry's achievements as a veteran. Bush served in the Texas National Guard, far from the war in Vietnam. Kerry, on the other hand, saved his comrades in 1969 when he threw himself at a Vietnamese rebel with a rocket launcher and killed him. Later, as a boatman on the Bay Hap River, he pulled a comrade out of the water with an injured arm who had fallen overboard in an ambush.
Almost 40 years later, some veterans of those Swift Boats questioned Kerry's account because they were angry that he had become a critic of the war. LaCivita used it to produce effective TV spots – an unfair campaign, according to fact checkers. This was all the more remarkable because LaCivita herself had been injured by shrapnel as a Marine during a combat mission in Iraq: According to an unwritten code of honor, US veterans show respect to one another.
They call Tim Walz a “coward”
Now a similar drama is unfolding around Walz. Trump's vice president JD Vance, also a former Marine, accused Walz of exaggerating his achievements. On Tuesday, LaCivita made it clear on social media who was behind it. “He abandoned his men before they went to war – he is a coward,” the campaign manager wrote about Walz. “He lied about a combat deployment and about his rank.”
This time, however, LaCivita has to be credited with the fact that Walz himself also violated the veterans' strict code of honor by failing to be precise. The accusation that Walz left the National Guard shortly before his unit was sent to Iraq is pointless. He asked to be discharged before the call-up for the overseas deployment was announced.
However, the Democrat expressed himself in a misleading way in a 2018 video when he said he had “carried military weapons in war”; Walz was never deployed in combat. Harris' campaign also claimed that Walz had retired as a “sergeant major.” He had served in that rank, but was formally retired as a “master sergeant,” a lower rank.
Kerry lost the election three years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when military performance seemed to be the deciding factor. It is not yet clear whether LaCivita's strategy will work again or whether it will simply show helplessness against the duo Harris and Walz.
One thing is certain: it will be an ugly election campaign. Citing an unnamed Trump campaign spokesman, the right-wing propaganda site Daily Caller on Monday that the attacks on Walz were just the beginning.
