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emulatorloo

(45,498 posts)
Mon Jul 22, 2024, 10:02 AM Jul 22

Trump co-chair Chris LaCivita is the monster who masterminded the Swift Boat lie campaign against Kerry. [View all]

I’m late to the the party as I just learned this yesterday in an article in the Atlantic.

This is the amoral despicable person who has decided to help Trump destroy the USA.

I just saw this despicable asshole name-calling and trashing Pete on X

From an older article in the New York Magazine:

The Swiftboater Coming for Biden With co-pilot Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita has brought discipline to the Trump campaign. Is that enough to win?
By David Freedlander, a writer covering New York and national politics for New York Magazine
Updated Feb 22, 2024

Paywall: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-campaign-chris-lacivita-swift-boat-veteran.html
Gift: https://archive.is/NGqA8


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.”


Like Trump, LaCivita and his co-chair Susie Wiles need to be vanquished and destroyed in 2024.

Let’s make sure we do everything in our power to elect Kamala Harris and consign these creeps to the dustbin of history.
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