George Allen, the Republican former governor of Virginia, was debating Democratic senator Chuck Robb, and it wasn’t going well. Allen’s campaign wanted to tie Robb, a Virginia political institution, to President Bill Clinton, who in August 2000 was in the post-Monica political wilt, but Allen got off topic and hadn’t mentioned Clinton once in the first 15 minutes.
At the commercial break, Allen’s chief strategist, a burly Marine veteran named Chris LaCivita, approached him, getting so close their noses were nearly touching. Allen had just an hour of debate time left, LaCivita told him, and he needed to mention Clinton at least five times. LaCivita went back to his seat in the audience and held up five fingers, and every time Allen did what he was told, LaCivita lowered one finger.
“Allen,” the Washington Post wrote the next day, “used every exchange with Robb in their 90 minutes together to tie the two-term senator to ‘Clinton-speak,’ the ‘Clinton-Gore crew’ and a national agenda that he said is antithetical to Virginia’s cautious, conservative traditions.”
Even Robb seemed exhausted by it.
“I don’t know how many times he mentioned Clinton-Gore values, or whatever,” Robb said after the debate, pointing out that he had voted as often with President George H.W. Bush as he had with Clinton and accusing Allen of being “programmed.”
A longtime brawler and veteran of Republican politics, including the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry in 2004, today LaCivita is officially senior adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — but he is really the de facto co–campaign manager along with Susie Wiles. Together, they have brought an unprecedented level of discipline to the campaign’s third iteration. (If you want to find drama these days, you’ll have to settle for former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski talking smack to reporters about former campaign manager Paul Manafort; Trump 2024 gossip, in other words, is about Trump 2016.) When Trump’s impulsive side comes out — like when he went on a tirade against Nikki Haley that made liberal use of a misspelling of her Indian first name four days before the New Hampshire primary — it is widely seen as evidence that he had slipped his minders.
LaCivita, speaking by phone last month at the airport where he was on his way to join Trump in Florida, insisted that this analysis was wrong.
“It’s the president’s name on the ballot, not mine,” he says. “My job in this campaign is no different than it’s been in any other. The president sets the tone, the president makes clear what the goals are; my job is to put together with Susie the rest of the team and to make sure that the plan is actually executed. That’s it.”
That said, there is some difference between them. When I ask LaCivita what will decide the 2024 election, he avoids the language of Trumpian grievance to make a bread-and-butter case for a second term.
“The message is built around inflation; it’s built around where the country as a whole stands on the world stage. It’s stopping endless wars, stopping World War III. It’s putting the issues that the people really care about back in the forefront,” he says. “It’s not some difficult-to-understand Washington, D.C., dreamed-up construct that a bunch of people cooked up in the White House that they have a hard enough time trying to get the candidate to actually say. People wake up every single day and they see the major issues facing the country and it’s the first issue that they have to deal with — the high cost of energy, the cost of groceries. Just insert the issue, but we view things through that lens.”
According to a dozen people working on and close to the campaign, Wiles and LaCivita have figured out that part of Trump’s appeal is the performance and that he can’t really be managed anyway — look no further than Trump randomly urging Russia to attack NATO members. Instead, Wiles manages internal matters (“She controls the checkbook,” as one person put it) while LaCivita plots the overall strategy. He ran the ground game in Iowa that crushed Ron DeSantis in the caucuses and pushed the Republican parties of Nevada and California to change their delegate-allocation rules to favor Trump.
“LaCivita is just a supremely competent nuts-and-bolts guy,” says Donald Trump Jr. “He doesn’t care about getting credit, he doesn’t care about stroking his own ego, he only cares about getting the job done and delivering for my father. He’s also not afraid to throw some bombs on Twitter when necessary, which is something I can obviously relate to and very much appreciate.”
Trump has notoriously liked setting aides against each other, vying for his affection, like when he made Reince Priebus his first White House chief of staff and Steve Bannon “chief strategist” with both of them leaving the new administration within seven months. But people close to Trump today say that even he is tired of the antics, and with the 2024 election now possibly determining whether or not he goes to prison, he has opted for a more professional approach.
“2016 was a totally shambolic operation, just a guy on a plane surrounded by a rotating cast of jokers,” says Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “By 2020, you had a more professionalized operation, but the campaign was led by his web designer until the home stretch. He came close with the B-team, and now we get to see what happens when you bring in some of the most shrewd, calculating, and ruthless operators in the party.”
The change is clear to one veteran of both of Trump’s prior campaigns. “It’s not like apples and oranges. It is like apples and elephants,” they say. “I honestly couldn’t tell you where Susie ends and Chris begins.”
Wiles has been more of an object of fascination from the press, largely because of her baroque backstory: She helped rescue the Trump 2016 operation in Florida, then left to join Ron DeSantis, then came back to the Trump fold after falling out with the governor. LaCivita, meanwhile, is just a campaign-trail hound, the kind of person who lives for political combat. Once this campaign ends, he is more likely to just swoop into the next race, then parlay his post into a cable-news contract.
“In this business, it’s really hard to find people that think like you, and I’m not talking in a philosophical sense or an ideological sense; I’m talking about the way you view the world vis-à-vis expectations management, where the word ‘no’ doesn’t exist,” LaCivita told two Trump campaign veterans on the Line Drive podcast last month. “Don’t tell me ‘It can’t be done,’ tell me how it can get done. There’s no daylight between she and I. And if there is, we work it out privately, but there hasn’t been. We talk five or six times a day when we’re not actually physically together in the campaign headquarters or on the road. [It’s a structure] that traditionally would not work because everybody wants to be the top person in a campaign, but our goal is to win. I can give a shit about who’s first.”
LaCivita, 57, got his start in politics after serving in the Gulf War, where he took shrapnel in the chin and received a Purple Heart. In 1991, after the war, he was paid $500 to run the campaign for a board of supervisors of Chesterfield County, outside Richmond, and parlayed that into a job working on Allen’s congressional campaign. (He once swam in frigid water to plant an Allen campaign sign on a small island in the middle of a bay and stopped traffic on a turnpike so that Allen’s supporters could march across and attend a debate.) Almost immediately after Allen won, he turned around and ran for governor. That campaign was successful too, and LaCivita became the executive director of the Virginia GOP. A few years later, he ran political strategy for the Republicans’ Senate-campaign arm in Washington.
To the extent LaCivita has achieved any notoriety in his career, it is for his role helping run the Swift Boat campaign that has been credited with sinking Kerry in 2004. Early in the campaign, allegations were bubbling on the right that the Democrat, campaigning as a war hero against post-9/11 George W. Bush, was inflating his record in Vietnam. These same veterans were furious Kerry had denounced the war after returning home, and one named John O’Neill teamed up with Jerome Corsi, who would later inspire Donald Trump on his birther crusade, to write a book called Unfit for Command. But it was LaCivita who turned their fringe allegations into a campaign funded by millions of dollars in shadowy contributions. The operation cut campaign ads with vet testimonials questioning Kerry’s service.
“He just knew how to frame the message and how to deliver it,” says one person involved in the effort. “We could have done cookie-cutter campaign ads, but he knew that wouldn’t have worked. He’s a political animal, and he always wants to be in the fight.”
The Swift Boat campaign stretched the boundaries of what had been considered within bounds of acceptable politics, both by using an outside, dark-money vehicle in a presidential campaign in the pre-super-PAC era, and also for broadcasting what were later revealed to be demonstrably false claims against Kerry.
Still, today most Republicans operatives view the episode as one to be proud of, and it provides a template for how LaCivita will go after Joe Biden and the Democrats: not by attacking what is perceived as Biden’s weaknesses but his strengths. If Biden portrays himself as the person defending American democracy from Trump, then, as LaCivita told the Line Drive podcast, they will argue “it’s Biden that’s really against democracy, right? Biden against democracy — that stands for BAD.”
“You lose elections when you surprise the electorate,” says Hogan Gidley, a Line Drive co-host who was the Trump 2020 campaign’s press secretary. “Everybody knew Clinton was a dirtbag, and so the whole Monica thing didn’t shock anybody. And so the media and the left want you to think that Joe is just Ol’ Steady Hand Joe who keeps everything stable. But then you have all the instability, all the chaos, and the projection onto our party of the things that Democrats are guilty of doing. Chris has a way of reframing the argument so that it takes away their opponent’s strongest argument and takes away something that America believes about a candidate.”
After cutting down John Kerry, LaCivita started to develop a reputation of bringing a kind of devil-may-care attitude to politics. In 2010, during Rand Paul’s run for Senate, GQ published a story about a bizarre tale from Paul’s college days when he and a buddy, both stoned, allegedly forced a fellow female student to worship a made-up god, “Aqua Buddha.” The campaign considered suing GQ, but, according to McKay Coppins’s book, LaCivita laughed it off as “fucking hilarious. I love that.” In 2014, he parachuted into Kansas to rescue Pat Roberts, a longtime Republican senator who no longer lived in the state. In the final weeks of the campaign, Roberts was losing to independent candidate Greg Orman. LaCivita went scorched earth, tying Orman to Barack Obama. In the race’s closing days, when the senator’s wife and daughter asked LaCivita to tone it down a bit, he told them no. Roberts won.
In 2022, LaCivita was brought in to help save the campaign of Ron Johnson, the firebrand Wisconsin senator running for a third term with a negative approval rating in a state that Biden won. Johnson blitzed his opponent, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, vying to become Wisconsin’s first Black senator, with a ruthless series of ads that blamed him for a rise in crime, accused him of wanting to defund the police, and tied him to members of the Squad. One ad called Barnes “different,” a word that melded into another onscreen: “dangerous.” Critics called it racist, but Johnson — one of the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbents — put away Barnes so early that national Democrats stopped funding the race by the end of October.
LaCivita has worked in just about every corner of Republican politics this century, helping run the Republican National Convention in 2016, where he beat back an effort by anti-Trump forces to deny him the nomination, but also with more Establishment-friendly figures like Charlie Crist, the Congressional Leadership Fund back when Paul Ryan was House Speaker, and Anthony Gonzalez, an Ohio congressman drummed out of the party after he voted to impeach Trump. He was seen by many political observers as too much of a party regular to join the Trump 2020 operation or the White House — and so was spared getting involved in the later coup machinations of so many Trump officials.
Trump first became aware of LaCivita’s work when he came on late in the 2020 campaign cycle to work on a super-PAC funded mostly by Sheldon Adelson, which poured $84 million into the Trump reelection effort. In early 2022, Tony Fabrizio, a longtime Trump pollster, started having informal conversations with Wiles about who could come into Trump’s inevitable third White House run as a senior strategist.
Wiles and LaCivita clicked over several meetings together down in Florida, then he was introduced to Trump. Following their meeting, Trump called around to other Republican figures about LaCivita and liked what he heard: that LaCivita was an aggressive operator unafraid, as he showed in 2004, to unleash the occasionally dirty trick if necessary and a professional in a way that many of Trump’s previous political advisers had not been.
Working for Trump has also been a boon for LaCivita’s business. Since coming onboard in October 2022, the Trump campaign has paid $30,000 a month for his “political strategy consulting.” At the same time, his consulting business, Advancing Strategies LLC, has received more than $17 million from the campaign and Trump-affiliated groups, mostly for media services and advertising.
If LaCivita had any reservations about joining Trumpworld, he never showed it.
“The dude is all in,” said one person close to the campaign. “You get in the trenches with Donald Trump and you very quickly become a true believer or you don’t last long. You come in and you start seeing the media incoming, you start seeing the lawfare and pretty quickly you are just in the foxhole with him. And for Chris, I think there is a part of him that just loves proving all the fucking assholes wrong about Donald Trump.”
Trump’s announcement this month that LaCivita would take over the RNC’s finances and spending mystified even many Republican operatives, in part because of how Trump announced it, saying in a press releases that “I have also asked Chris LaCivita, in whom I have full confidence, to assume the role of, in effect, Chief Operating Officer of the Committee.”
“‘In effect?’ Like, what the fuck does that even mean? Why not just announce it?” said one GOP operative. “It seems like Trump is just spitballing. Why would you send your ace over to the RNC?”
The move will put LaCivita at the center of a sprawling network of various fundraising operations for the 2024 campaign and is seen as further proof that the national party is just another arm of the Trump campaign with LaCivita effectively running both.
When we spoke, he said he was ready.
“I don’t know many people who don’t want to make America great again. Now there are some people that want to demonize or minimize the significance of that statement, but it has a real meaning and it is the core of what we do,” LaCivita said. “What I’ve done for the last 32 years in one form or fashion have been campaigns aimed at beating Democrats. That’s what I do. But I was given an opportunity where it’s not just about beating a Democrat, it’s actually being part of a movement at the highest level.”
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