WASHINGTON — Twenty years after he attacked a fellow Purple Heart recipient on the campaign trail, Chris LaCivita is back on the campaign trail, this time for Donald Trump, who has avoided military service by claiming he has bone spurs and later called U.S. service members “idiots” and “losers.”
LaCivita is one of two political consultants credited with providing the former president, convicted of attempted coups, with a more effective and professional campaign than he did in the 2016 and 2020 elections. He has sought to discredit Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard since Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced Tuesday as the Democratic nominee for vice president.
Trump’s campaign and its allies, run by Lassivita, accuse Walz of abandoning his National Guard unit just before it was deployed to Iraq and of falsely implying during a previous congressional campaign that he had combat experience stationed overseas.
“He’s going to be a household name,” LaCivita bragged in a social media post. “Once we’re done with him, he’s going to be like turpentine.”
Lasivita, 58, did not respond to HuffPost questions about why she decided to work for someone who has mocked military service for decades, despite the blood shed and injuries she sustained on behalf of the United States during the Gulf War.
In a recent interview with The Atlantic, LaCivita said morality wasn’t a factor in his decision about who to work for. “I wasn’t in a position to judge anyone,” he said.
“People hire me to beat the Democratic Party. That’s what I do. That’s what Chris Lasivita does. He beats the Democratic Party.”
Trump avoided being sent to Vietnam in the 1960s by claiming he had a bone spur in his foot. He continued to play sports, but asked his wealthy and influential father’s friend and tenant, a doctor, to write him a letter. Years later, he compared his fear of contracting a sexually transmitted disease from his many encounters with women at the time to the dangers faced by American soldiers in the jungles of Indochina.
“This is my personal Vietnam,” he said. “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
Trump, in his first presidential campaign, pushed back at a debate in Iowa against claims that then-Arizona Sen. John McCain, who spent nearly six years in a North Vietnamese prison after his plane was shot down, deserved respect for that. “He wasn’t a war hero,” Trump said. “He was a war hero because he was a prisoner of war. I like people who weren’t prisoners of war.”
In the latter stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, he also disparaged the families of Muslim American soldiers killed in Iraq.
Then, as president, he famously refused to attend a memorial service at a World War I cemetery in France because it was raining, derided the U.S. Marines buried there as “losers,” and instead tweeted from the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Paris that afternoon. He later called soldiers who died serving the U.S. “idiots.”
Despite Trump’s years of openly mocking American service members and their sacrifices, Lasivita nevertheless decided to work for him in 2022, and is credited with bringing a level of competency to Trump’s campaign that he, along with Suzy Wiles, has never had before.
The most recent was the denigration of Waltz, whose decision to stay in the Army and prepare for retirement for a few months rather than deploy to Iraq in 2005 is now being used as a pretext by Lassivita.
It’s familiar territory for him. In 2004, with funding from Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor and supporter of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Lasivita led the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group, whose mission was to discredit then-U.S. Senator John Kerry when he ran for president against incumbent George W. Bush.
Bush had sought to enlist in the Air National Guard from Texas during the Vietnam War, but the enlistment positions were far lower than those offered to Kerry, who had earned a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts as a patrol boat officer in combat.
Lassivita, who received a Purple Heart for combat wounds in 1991, nonetheless targeted Kerry in a television ad that claimed his medal was not legitimate and questioned his entire service record. The ad hurt Kerry, who initially thought no one would believe such an outrageous claim, and ultimately lost to Bush by a narrow margin.
Twenty years later, the new target is Walls. And while most of the attacks are being carried out by Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, Lasivita is amplifying his message on social media accounts, where he is followed by a large number of campaign reporters.
“When his men needed him most… when they were headed into the ordeal of battle… he abandoned them… left them. Why? So that he could run for Congress,” Lassivita wrote.
His boss, Trump, also frequently capitalizes random words in his posts, but it’s unclear why he capitalized “crucible.”
And when Alyssa Farrah Griffin, the former White House communications director for the Trump administration, praised Walz’s military service, Lasivita again followed Trump’s lead and attacked her personally.
“Hey, you’re really stupid,” he wrote.
Mo Elish, a Democratic political consultant who worked on LaCivita’s behalf in Virginia’s statewide race and 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 operators I know. Anyone who opposes his candidacy ignores him and his strategy at their own peril,” Ellis said. “Fortunately, the Harris camp has learned from the Kerry camp’s mistakes and is pushing back aggressively. He won’t give up. And neither should they.”
Rick Wilson, a former Republican political consultant who now works for the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said Lascivita’s attack on Walz was a distraction. “I think the Trump team is so desperate right now that no one remembers Trump dodging active-duty military service,” Wilson said. “We’re not going to stop defending Walz. We’re going to directly attack Trump and his record of denigrating service members and dodging the draft.”
Trump faces felony charges in state courts in Georgia and federal courts in Washington, D.C., for his attempts to cling to power despite losing the 2020 election. He is already a convicted felon after being convicted in New York City of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide hush money he paid to a porn star just before he won the 2016 election. An additional federal felony charge for refusing to turn over secret documents he took with him to a South Florida country club when he left the White House could be reinstated by an appeals court after a judge he appointed dismissed it last month.
But if he were re-elected, he could direct his attorney general to dismiss all federal charges against him and delay further proceedings in state courts, including a possible prison sentence in New York next month, until after he finishes his term.
HuffPost senior writer Arthur Delaney contributed to this article.
