WASHINGTON — Two decades after attacking a fellow Purple Heart recipient in a political campaign, Chris LaCivita is back at it, this time in service of Donald Trump, who dodged military service by claiming he had bone spurs and who later called U.S. service members “suckers” and “losers.”
LaCivita is one of two established political consultants credited with giving the coup-attempting, convicted criminal former president a more effective and professional campaign this time compared to his 2016 and 2020 runs. He has, since the announcement of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as the Democratic vice presidential nominee on Tuesday, been busy attempting to discredit Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard.
Trump’s campaign, run by LaCivita, and its allies are accusing Walz of abandoning his Guard unit just as it was about to be deployed to Iraq and for falsely suggesting in his earlier congressional campaigns that he had seen combat in a previous overseas posting.
“He’s going to be a household name,” LaCivita boasted in a social media post. “Like turpentine when we get done with him.”
LaCivita, 58, did not respond to HuffPost queries about why, given the wounds he received and blood he personally shed on behalf of the United States during the first Gulf War, he had chosen to work for a man who has for decades mocked military service.
In a recent interview with The Atlantic, LaCivita indicated that morals did not enter into his calculations when deciding whom to work for. “I never put myself in a position of judging somebody,” he said.
“People hire me to beat Democrats. That’s what I do. That’s what Chris LaCivita does. He beats Democrats, period.”
Trump avoided getting sent to Vietnam in the 1960s by claiming he had bone spurs in his feet — even though he remained active in sports ― and finding a doctor who was a friend and tenant of his wealthy and influential father to write a note for him. Years later, he compared his own fears of contracting sexually transmitted diseases through his many encounters with women in that time period with the risks faced by U.S. troops in the jungles of Indochina.
“It is my personal Vietnam,” he said. “I feel like a great and very brave solider.”
During his first run for president, Trump, in one of the candidate forums in Iowa, disputed that then-Arizona Sen. John McCain, who spent nearly six years in a North Vietnamese prison after his plane was shot down, deserved admiration for that. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Later in the 2016 campaign, he disparaged the family of a Muslim American soldier who was killed in Iraq.
Then, as president, he famously refused to attend a ceremony at a World War I cemetery in France because it was raining, deriding the buried U.S. Marines there as “losers,” and instead spent the afternoon tweeting from the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris. Later he called troops who died in service to the United States “suckers.”
Despite all the years of Trump’s open derision of U.S. service members and their sacrifices, LaCivita nevertheless chose to work for him in 2022, and has been credited, along with Susie Wiles, for bringing a level of competence to Trump’s campaign that he had never before enjoyed.
Most recently, that work has involved denigrating Walz, whose decision to continue forward with a retirement months in the works rather than remain in uniform for a deployment to Iraq in 2005 is now fodder for LaCivita.
It is familiar territory for him. In 2004, backed with money from Harlan Crow — a billionaire GOP donor and patron to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — LaCivita helmed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group with a mission to smear the service of then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry as he ran for president against incumbent George W. Bush.
Bush had sought and found an Air National Guard slot in Texas during Vietnam, which compared poorly to Kerry’s record in the U.S. Navy that included a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts as an officer of a patrol boat in combat.
LaCivita, who was himself awarded a Purple Heart in 1991 for wounds suffered in battle, nevertheless targeted Kerry in television ads that suggested Kerry’s medals were not legitimately earned and questioned his entire service record. The ads hurt Kerry, who assumed initially that no one would believe such ridiculous allegations, and he wound up losing narrowly to Bush.
Twenty years later, the new target is Walz. And while the bulk of the attack is being carried out by Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, LaCivita is amplifying his message on his social media account, which is followed by numerous campaign reporters.
“When his men needed him the most .. as they headed into the Crucible that is combat … he deserted them … left them. Why? So he could run for Congress,” LaCivita wrote.
It is unclear why he capitalized “crucible,” although his boss, Trump, frequently capitalizes random words in his posts, as well.
And when former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin praised Walz’s military service, LaCivita — again appearing to mimic Trump — lashed out at her with a personal attack.
“Man, you are really that stupid,” he wrote.
Mo Elleithee, who worked on the opposite side of Virginia statewide races from LaCivita as a Democratic political consultant and who now runs the Georgetown University Institute of Politics, said Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz should not underestimate him.
“Chris is one of the most effective scorched-earth operatives I have ever known. Anyone on the other side of his candidates ignores him and his tactics at their own peril,” Elleithee said. “Luckily, the Harris campaign has learned from the Kerry campaign’s mistakes and is aggressively pushing back. He’s not going to let up. They shouldn’t either.”
Rick Wilson, once a fellow Republican political consultant who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said LaCivita’s attacks on Walz are a distraction. “Trump’s team is so desperate right now that they think no one will remember Trump’s dodging of active military service,” Wilson said. “We’re not going to stop to play defense for Walz. We’re going straight at Trump and his record of both denigrating military service members and avoiding the draft.”
Trump is facing felony charges for his attempts to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election both in Georgia state court and in federal court in Washington, D.C. He is already a convicted felon following guilty verdicts in New York City on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to a porn actor just before his 2016 election victory. Additional federal felony charges for refusing to turn over secret documents he took with him to his South Florida country club upon leaving the White House could be reinstated by an appeals court following their dismissal last month by a judge he appointed.
If he wins the presidency again, however, he would be able to instruct his attorney general to dismiss all federal charges against him and likely postpone further proceedings against him in state courts — including the prison sentence he could receive in New York next month — until he is no longer in office.
HuffPost senior reporter Arthur Delaney contributed to this story.