Chris LaCivita is sitting in a room of taxidermied animals. And they might as well be the pelts of his political opponents.
The former co-campaign manager for Donald Trump is probably one of the only people who isn’t surprised by the very loud start to his second presidency. And he’s also got a pretty good idea of where things are headed next.
After the election, the burly and blunt-talking LaCivita chose to remain in the private sector instead of following his old pal Susie Wiles into the Oval Office. Which means he’s now free to tell some secrets about how things really work inside Trump’s inner circle, and what the true meaning of Trump’s most controversial actions are.
I caught up with LaCivita on Thursday night in an interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, where he told me the truths about Project 2025 and Trump; what actual power Elon Musk has; some spicy tidbits about Trump’s plans to redevelop Gaza; and who he thinks will be the heir to the MAGA movement.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive Producer Kara Tabor and Senior Producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here:
Listen to this episode of Playbook Deep Dive on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
How are you seeing the strategy and conversations that you, President Trump and Susie Wiles had on the campaign trail translate to the White House? Is it lining up with what you thought it was going to look like?
Yeah, actually. I don’t think that the folks in Washington or the press corps, for that matter, were ready for it. Although they should have been …
I was ready.
… because they’ve been covering him for so long. And what I mean by that is just the volume, the speed and it’s so much to the average person. But if you just think back to the campaign and the amount of ground that the campaign covered, that the president covered on a daily basis, whether it was in a speech or a press conference, for instance, and just the sheer volume of issues covered and activities and all these things. I think some people didn’t think anybody would be able to maintain that degree of intensity right into the White House. And he did.
I mean, Donald Trump does more before 8 a.m. than most people do all day.
There have been dozens and dozens of executive orders already. How many of them do you recognize as stuff that you guys talked about and planned to roll out in these first 100 days?
I haven’t read every one of them, but I know there’s over 100 and all of the big ones on the bigger issues that he talked about doing — whether it was on men and women’s sports and transgender surgeries or the border, most importantly from that standpoint and some of the issues regarding public safety — every single thing that he said he was going to do in the executive orders, and then some.
None of this is a surprise to me, including the current conversation that we’re having on tariffs, and no one really knows how to respond. I don’t want to get out in front of you, but as it relates to tariffs, the Europeans and the Canadians, I mean, talk about how not to engage with Donald Trump.
What do you mean?
Well, part of the reason why we’re having this conversation about tariffs and the president imposing tariffs is because for far too long, the balance has been tipped for the Europeans, the balance has been tipped for the Canadians. I mean, Americans pay more, the governments of Europe subsidize the products, subsidize [their] companies.
So there’s this big-time trade imbalance that’s always existed. And it’s a degree of just basic unfairness that pisses the president off. And if the president’s talking about trying to bring some balance to an imbalance and then the other side responds with, “OK, well, then we’re just going to slap a 50-percent tariff on your whiskey,” Trump’s like, “Fuck you. I’m now going to put 200 percent on champagne and wine.”
I get your point. The thing that I’ve been watching though is the stock market, as I know a lot of folks in business have been watching.
A bunch of bed-wetters.
But folks with a 401(k), Chris. I think that President Trump and to some extent others like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have started to have a more frank conversation with the American people saying, “Hey, yeah, there might be some disturbance in the short term.”
Look at the amount of times there were disturbances in the last four years that went on for weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not lessening the impact. I have the same accounts in the same 401(k)s that other people have.
But you’re doing better than most average Americans.
Oh, please. Well, it depends on what publication you read, because a lot of them print a bunch of BS. But anyway, I think Secretary [Bessent] said there’s going to be some short-term volatility, well, there’s always going to be short-term volatility. There’s short-term volatility every quarter, every time a jobs report comes out, every time there’s an inflation report coming out.
But this is a more radical approach to tariffs and to trade than we’ve seen in a long time.
Since the last time [Trump] was there, yeah.
I’d say even more than the last time. There are some smaller and medium-size businesses that are saying, “Hey, we can’t respond to these quickly enough to keep our businesses open if we do end up having to pay these tariffs.” How is the White House going to message and square that?
Well, they have some really solid people that understand the marketplace, that understand how all of these things work, whether it’s Howard [Lutnick] over at Commerce, Scott [Bessent] over at Treasury and Kelly [Loeffler] at SBA. These are not insignificant or stupid people. They understand the interplay between the markets and business.
And look, there are things that have to change. It’s a recognition that we have to do something overall to create more of a trade balance. I remember when the Wall Street Journal went after the president on the steel tariffs back in his first term. And actually, they were 100 percent wrong and the tariffs actually helped the industry.
Look, I’m not discounting the fact that there’s a lot of shock therapy going on right now. It’s very fast. It’s a lot. It’s literally ripping the Band-Aid off.
Do you think your average American can handle that, even those who voted for Trump?
Yeah, I mean, we’re seeing it. The president’s numbers are still holding very, very strong. And it’s the same thing as it relates to what DOGE is doing with regard to government spending. I mean, the stuff they are finding is absurd.
A lot of this, by the way, is not new. A lot of this has been part of the government spending forever. So I think that we need to be more aggressive in pointing out how bad it really is — we’re paying to study the sex habits of snails or we’re paying to do this, we’re paying to do that. That’s real stuff. The average Joe can’t understand why we’re shelling out that kind of money. Now, they’re not going to cut Social Security. They’re not going to cut Medicare. They’re just not. That’s just fear-mongering from the left.
But Musk did say in an interview, I think with Larry Kudlow recently —
He’s not president. He doesn’t get to make those decisions.
So why is he saying that? Why is he out there saying that?
I don’t know. I don’t speak for him. He says whatever he says. But the fact of the matter is there is a House, there’s a Senate.
Is that kind of thing a problem for Trump though? Because that stuff freaks people out.
Well, no, it’s what freaks the media out because the media loves a boogeyman. And so the media has decided, “Oh, well, we’ve got Donald Trump. We’ll go after Elon.” So that’s what they’re doing.
In the first 100 days, given what I was hearing on the campaign trail, I really thought that immigration was going to be the top topic, but it has been a lot about Musk and DOGE. Are you surprised how dominant that conversation has been?
No, and this is right, because that is the media strategy, right? Because the border was such a winning issue for the president. It put him in a great position because open borders became such an open problem across the country, whether it was migrant crime and the billions and billions of dollars they were spending to put them up in the hotels. I could go on and on and on. The press decided, “OK, well, we’ll just eliminate that as an issue.”
The president obviously made all of the moves that he said he was gonna make on the campaign to end the open borders and to stop the funding and stop moving migrants — illegals — into other parts of the country on the taxpayer’s dime. So if the press puts a cap on it then, to them, it doesn’t exist as an issue. So then they refocus all of their firepower on the issue of government spending and DOGE.
So you think the only reason government spending is a story is because the media is covering it? But that’s what’s happening. There’s a lot more, I would say, happening on government spending — and tariffs, too, by the way — than there is on immigration right now. Where’s the mass deportation that the president talked about so much on the trail?
I mean, there’s deportations. First of all, you’ve been there 50 days, and he’s already moved out a lot of bad people. So that’s an ongoing process that will continue to happen throughout the year.
And what people don’t realize is from a Republican standpoint — a purely political standpoint — I love having a battle and a national debate on the issue of spending and taxes, because those are issues that are in the conservative Republican wheelhouse. That’s the one issue that unifies all Republicans. Ninety percent of Republicans, 95 percent of Republicans are unified on the issues of taxes and spending.
When we’re engaged in this big battle over government spending and the left are defending USAID and some of the bullshit they’ve been spending tens of millions of dollars on, billions of dollars on, for periods of years versus what it could be spent on, that’s a fight we’ll take any day of the week. When we get into the battle over taxes, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, reinstituting the 2017 tax cuts, making them permanent — that’s a battle that we like because that’s our turf.
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How hard is Susie Wiles’ job right now compared to the campaign trail?
It’s tough. She’s a warrior and a dear, dear friend, but she’s perfectly up for the task. I mean, that’s one tough cookie.
I used to joke on the campaign all the time — because it’s a statement of fact and anybody that knows me knows it to be true — that when you’re dealing with me, you see me coming a mile away. I make a lot of noise. Susie, she’ll sneak right up on you.
It’s one of the toughest jobs in the world. But she does it with a degree of grace and humility, and she’s very determined. She’s very good at keeping people moving in the right direction, even people that may be across it with each other. She has an ability to hold things together, and that’s just something that this White House will continue to lean on.
On the trail, often one of the communications from you and Susie — and from Trump himself — was disavowing Project 2025. It was written about a lot, it was talked about a lot, and you guys kept saying, “No, this is not a thing.” Now, there are a ton of folks who worked on Project 2025, a bunch of Heritage people in the administration and some language from that 900-page manifesto that’s been making its way in. Was the distancing of Project 2025 just a messaging thing on the trail? Is this a Project 2025 administration?
No. Because here’s the thing about Project 2025. And this wasn’t a debate that we were willing to have in a campaign, because in a campaign, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. People don’t realize that in Project 2025, there are things like, “We believe in lower taxes. We believe in reducing the size and scope of government.” A ton of stuff in Project 2025 is your standard Republican fare. Standard conservative stuff. But there was some stuff in there that we were like, “Where the hell did that come from?”
I remember when somebody at The New York Times published a story one day and the president was reading it on the airplane and he was like, “Where the hell did this come from?”
And the story was that if Trump is elected president, he will reinstitute nuclear testing.
And he’s like, “Where the fuck did that come from? No, we never put a statement out on this.” Somebody in Project 2025 wrote a paper that said this was a policy. Well, it’s just completely made up. I mean, they can write whatever they want, but just because you have some of the people that work for it doesn’t mean that we would reinstitute testing nuclear weapons. It’s the same thing with taxes.
Is there anything that has surprised you in these first few weeks of the administration?
Yeah, the left’s inability to coalesce behind a single message in opposition.
For a party that essentially has, for the last 12 years, the last eight years, built itself around one thing, which was hating Donald Trump, I’m just surprised at their inability at this point to bite really effectively. They’re all over the map. They have any number of idiots out there trying to TikTok or whatever the hell it is that they do to get attention. I find it quite amusing.
Do you worry at all that the economic turmoil might give Democrats the opening they need?
The economic turmoil is built on the market. I remember when there was economic turmoil during the Biden years and people would say, “That’s not economic turmoil. That’s just the market being the market.”
Sure, but then Biden and Harris lost the election still.
Well, they lost the election because of inflation. They didn’t lose the election because of the stock market.
Right, but if there’s a recession, which Trump has acknowledged is a possibility, whoever’s in that seat is going to get the blame.
Well, there’s plenty of time between now and the midterms and it’s all speculation at this point. So, we just continue to battle it out.
I know, but Trump does watch the stock market. He certainly watches his approval ratings and the headlines. How strong a stomach does he have for that if there are those bumps in the turmoil in the short term? How strong is his stomach to hold to these policies?
All you have to do is just look at the strength of his stomach for all the bullshit he had to put up with in the course of his campaign. They tried to keep him off the ballot. They tried to put him in jail and then he survived two assassination attempts. Anybody that has the kind of stomach to endure that, wake up every single day, put on that suit and that tie and stand up in front of a crowd of 10,000 people and motivate the shit out of them should not underestimate his ability to put up with a couple ups and downs in the stock market.
Do you think that our allies globally are going to get the message of how Trump works?
Man, they’re stupid. Europeans, man.
You said at the outset they’re not figuring out how to deal with him. But is there danger in that though, when there is so much uncertainty and it’s the on-again, off-again with the tariffs? Or is the fact that nobody knows what he’s going to do here the point?
Look, I think that’s part of the point. We’ve basically subsidized Europe for the last 50 years, 60 years of post-World War II, and of course we did the rebuilding and we’ve done all these things and they were able to create these social paradises where the government paid for everything because they didn’t have to pay for their national defense. You know, at some point in time, that gravy train’s got to end. Well, the gravy train’s ending now. The Cold War’s over. The balance of power and the shifts, all those things have changed. The politicians in Europe don’t want to change, and they sure don’t want to change at the pace that it’s being forced on them to change how they go about spending. So that’s going to create a level of angst.
But at the same time, they’re arrogant as hell. I’ve spent time in Europe in the last couple of weeks and they still don’t get it. They don’t understand that there’s a new sheriff in town and he has very, very set ways and opinions about how we’re going to actually put America first. And “America First” means that. It means, “We’re first. You’re second.”
How do you translate the “America First” policy to some of the other moves he’s making, like getting quite involved all over the world, potentially turning the Gaza Strip into the Middle East “Riviera”? How do you square the entanglements with “America First”?
The Trump administration weren’t the ones who tried to build a pier over in Gaza, and that ended up almost, I think, killing a couple Americans. And it was a disgrace. It was another abomination from the Biden administration. But when President Trump brought that up, it’s now forced a discussion about who’s actually going to redevelop the Gaza Strip. So I thought it was brilliant. Because now they’re talking about who’s going to do that.
You don’t think he actually wants to build a Riviera of the Middle East?
I think he wants to make it clear that if you don’t do it, we will. Sometimes the best motivation for people is a swift kick in the ass. But I also think that from the standpoint of trying to extract it or at least put an end to the war in Ukraine from the standpoint of just the sheer volume of killing and destruction that’s going on — when was that ever a bad thing?
Translate Trump for us there too, because it seems like he’s been a whole lot harder on Ukraine, at least publicly, than he has on Russia. And now it’s Russia that’s refusing a ceasefire. So can you translate why he is online and in public calling Zelenskyy a dictator and being quite harsh on Ukraine and being a little kinder to Russia?
Look at Zelenskyy — their entire defense has been funded primarily by United States taxpayers — and the way he behaved in the White House. I mean, that’s just not what you do. They knew better and that got corrected. And now we’re literally having a conversation that the Russians are the ones who aren’t [behaving]. So now they’re going to feel the end of it.
I think clearly what a lot of people in the press aren’t used to is seeing these kinds of things play out in front of them. Usually it happens behind the scenes. As the Washington Post loves to remind readers, “democracy dies in darkness,” despite the fact that they participated in the largest cover-up in governmental history by covering up Joe Biden’s ineptitude and capability to function. So you’re seeing a lot of things transparently happen on the world stage.
But Donald Trump is not hard to figure out. He says what he means and he does what he says. I know some people have a hard time coming to grips with that. But ending the war in Europe, wanting to create a degree of stability in the Middle East — let’s not forget they did do the Abraham Accords, which they got no credit for doing. There’s some proof in their pudding in terms of what they can actually accomplish. The releasing of all these hostages that we’ve been able to get, whether they’re from Russia or the Middle East or Venezuela.
So there’s a lot of activity and a lot of stuff going on that’s actually having I think a solid impact. But that’s not engaging us in more entanglements. That’s about getting results for basic things that we need to get done. The same thing with the Panama Canal, that was new, but that’s clearly something that has bothered the president immensely. It bothered American policymakers.
So Panama Canal, Greenland, Canada being the 51st state: How literally should we take him on those?
I mean, look, I think that the Canadians have just stepped in a bucket of — they are so dependent on the United States for everything. So to want to engage in a rhetorical war, they’re just not going to win. And I think it’s really short-sighted on their part, but I think people should also realize that there’s an election in Canada right now. And so politics is really fueling this in Canada, because right after the election is over, no matter who’s in charge, they’re going to be like, “Oh, shit. What did we just do?” Because the impacts of what they’re doing here now are going to last a hell of a lot longer than six months.
The president made it very clear, and if people would read the executive order on the initial discussion on the 25-percent tariffs in Canada and Mexico, the one thing that they would see that is universally throughout that point is a discussion on fentanyl. People don’t realize this, but that’s driving the discussion. Not only with the Chinese who produce the precursors for fentanyl and they ship it. Because part of their goal is to weaken the interior of the United States.
I think the confusion there from folks is the disparity between Canada and Mexico on fentanyl. Canada, it’s like, what, 40 pounds a year or something? Whereas it’s thousands coming across the Mexican border.
Well, let’s put it this way: The Canadians have imported enough fentanyl in the last year to kill every single person that resides in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Now, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of people. So it’s a fact. The Mexicans, their cartels have smuggled enough to kill every single American three times. Four hundred fifty thousand people died from fentanyl. That’s more than World War II.
No doubt it’s one of the biggest crises plaguing our country.
But my point is that the president does not feel that they’ve done enough to stem the importation and he’s sick of it. So he’s like, “Look, if you don’t do enough on this, then this is what you have to deal with.”
It’s not what people want to hear, but if they read the executive order, then they know, “Oh, that’s what it is.”
All right, last question for you.
Fire away.
2028. Bannon vs. Vance, who do you vote for?
Who?
Stephen Bannon. He might be running.
Oh, please, come on. No. JD Vance is the man.
Is Vance carrying on the MAGA mantle right now, if there were somebody?
I think he is and I think he’s doing a great job. First of all, I know that the vice president doesn’t like the attention or the discussion about that. I mean, my God, 50 days in.
It’s a little early, but we pesky reporters …
The shit-stirrers are always trying to stir. But JD is just fundamentally not only a good person, a brilliant person. I think he’s more than capable of carrying on the MAGA mantle. But you know, it’s still a long ways away.
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