Despite the impact weather has had on the bricks, giving them a wavy appearance, it adds a unique charm and character to the street, which is lined almost exclusively with tidy midcentury red brick homes. That is with the exception of one stone home on the slope side of the street with an architectural style that sets it apart from the rest.

Built in 1940, it was the home of Michael and Mary Ann LaCivita. For the first 12 years of Chris LaCivita’s life, this neighborhood was his everything. It was where he and his four brothers were born. It was the neighborhood where he would go to school and church, deliver the newspaper, play football with the other children, and build a snow-shoveling business with his brothers.

This is the place that formed Chris LaCivita, who, along with Susie Wiles, led President Donald Trump‘s winning campaign last year.

It took a while for LaCivita to realize how this background and rootedness guided him throughout his political career. Sitting at the head of the table of honor at the Wyndham Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh with his mother beside him, LaCivita was humbled by the attention from local Republicans as he received an award from Sen. David McCormick (R-PA) at the Allegheny County GOP’s annual Lincoln Day Dinner.

He was a little out of sorts about a profile being written about him. “I just want to go on the record to say I hate profiles,” he said.

LaCivita is the second oldest of five boys. His father was a public relations executive with Equitable Gas, and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. His parents surrounded the boys with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all living within miles of each other.

“Sunday, there was a routine. You would go to Mass, and if it wasn’t during Steelers football season, you’d go to Mass and then we would go visit one of my dad’s sisters, which there were plenty of them, or at my grandmother’s for Sunday supper,” he said.

LaCivita described his grandmother as “this tiny little Italian lady that barely spoke a word of English.” After she died, the family would do Sunday supper at one of his relatives’ homes. “And that was quite the thing because my mom and dad were bringing in three boys, then four boys, then five boys. So you can imagine,” he said. “And it was always a big lunch or a big dinner, and that’s what we did on Sundays.”

LaCivita said that even at the time, he understood it was a good childhood. “My mom was home,” he said. “My dad was at work in the summer months. We spent all of our time at McKeesport High School playing football or basketball. It’s just what we did from sunrise to sunset.”

Every once in a while, they spent the day at Kennywood Park, a local amusement park on a ridge just across the Edgar Thomson Steel Works that was filled with old wooden rollercoasters, bumper cars, and cavernous pavilions.

“When my kids were old enough to appreciate it, the first thing I did was take them, too, and of course, they had more fun at Kennywood than they did at Disney World,” he said. “Oh, my God. And then we’d go to Pirates games. I was an altar boy at St. Pius and an altar boy at St. Mary’s German.”

It was the mid-1970s, and the first sign of economic trouble was about to hit McKeesport. The Roman Catholic parish right by LaCivita’s home closed at the end of his first year of grade school. It was once a thriving city, significant enough that President John F. Kennedy campaigned there in 1962. The downtown also boasted two large multilevel department stores, a luxury hotel, restaurants, supper clubs, and numerous specialized retail shops.

The world around LaCivita began to change. His father lost his job, several of his aunts and uncles died, and the community was hurting. The mills began to close, forcing people to move. Nearly 18% of the city’s residents left, eventually including the LaCivitas. This fracturing of place happened across the Rust Belt for decades.

“First of all, we were moving to Virginia, and the only thing I knew about Virginia was what I saw on the television, and well, that was The Waltons,” LaCivita said. “Oh, and they did not have a football team.”

LaCivita is constantly moving. This was true back when he was in school, too.

“I was a horrible student. Horrible student,” he admitted with a smile. “I don’t know what it was. I just wasn’t interested a whole lot. Just wasn’t interested. I didn’t get in trouble. I just was bored, I guess. I would read like crazy, but I just wasn’t particularly interested in schoolwork.”

“I bombed my SATs. I mean, I started working when I was 15,” he added. “I spent my summers cutting people’s grass, winters shoveling snow, cleaning people’s gutters. I was always looking to make a buck. Always moving. But studying for SATs? No. That wasn’t me.”

That’s not all. “I delivered newspapers. Cleaned gutters. Cut massive lawns, and that was before high school,” he said. “Then, I got a job during high school working at Kings Dominion until I graduated. I worked rides and that kind of stuff at the amusement park with my older brother. And I worked at a steakhouse, washing dishes. I was also a stock boy at Food Lion, the night shift. I did everything, a little bit of everything.”

LaCivita said he always knew he was conservative, but he was never very political. That all changed as he was staggering through undergraduate studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in the late 1980s. He was disillusioned. He wasn’t being challenged. Worse, he felt like he was being told what to think.

Then, a political science professor suggested that the government should be in charge of healthcare, which led to a robust debate. LaCivita eventually pursued a master’s in public administration.

“So, at the time, I was somewhat active with politics, quasi-affiliated, but not really with the College Republicans,” he said, adding, “I’d go to their events basically to drink their beer and to meet the girls. It was my Marine buddies and I — that’s what we would do. We’d go to CR stuff, not to be CRs, but to hang out and go to all their parties.”

The next thing that changed everything was that his Marine unit got activated for the Persian Gulf War while he was in graduate school.

LaCivita left for the war on New Year’s Day 1991, returning five months later with a Purple Heart. He had been shot in the face on his mother’s birthday.

LaCivita described the moment as a “pissing match with a bunch of Iraqis” in which his unit took direct fire. The scars on his face where he was hit left him with nerve damage. The Kevlar jacket likely saved his life when he took a hit from shrapnel, leaving him with three cracked ribs instead.

“I really had no idea of what I was going to do, was going to go back to school, and my energy level was like a hundred times more,” LaCivita said of his return home. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate. There was a lot of things I couldn’t do.”

So, LaCivita found an outlet. His father had a friend who was running for the board of supervisors and needed help with his race: “Dad said, ‘He is going to give you $500 and $50 for expenses.’ And I said, ‘OK.’” That candidate was George Allen, who won and went on to run for Congress in a special election.

“Here is the thing: I went from a board of supervisors race straight into a congressional race, and I knew who George Allen was, but I did not know that he was running for Congress. I just thought he was running for reelection,” he said of his upgrade from a local race to the big times.

Allen won that race, too. LaCivita then got his first taste of Washington, D.C., after taking a job in Allen’s congressional office. “I spent 14 months in Washington as a legislative assistant,” LaCivita said. “Loved it, thought it was the coolest thing. And then George got redistricted out of his House seat, and he ran for governor.”

LaCivita married his college sweetheart, Catherine, and had two children. He would go on to have his hand in numerous successful and some not-so-successful political races over the next 25 years. He was the political director of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, was the principal media adviser for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and reshaped Republican politics with few people knowing his name. Until the fall of 2022, when Susie Wiles came calling.

Wiles, who did not know LaCivita at the time other than by his take-no-prisoners reputation, was looking for a certain kind of person to work with the Trump team. LaCivita fit that bill. “He’s done every blue-collar job that could possibly be. He’s worked in a factory. He’s been a waiter. He grew up in a family where his dad worked for the government,” she said. “So, he understands that pretty uniquely, too. Just the culture of the bureaucracy and how corrosive it could be. There’s not much he hasn’t done. He’s been a Marine for heaven’s sake.”

“When the president decided to run [in the 2024 race], he said to me, ‘Well, you ran Florida, and you won and you’ve been doing great,’” referring to her overseeing his successful Florida operation in 2016 and 2020.

“’I think you should run the whole thing this time, but you’re not a ‘blank’ and you need to go find me one,’” Wiles said. “And so I thought, ‘OK, well, I mean, this is sort of a big deal for me,’ so I called my best friend in politics, Tony Fabrizio, and told him this is what the president wants.”

Fabrizio didn’t miss a beat. “He said, ‘I got the guy, can you come to dinner next Thursday?’” Wiles said. “And by now, I thought I knew everybody at politics in our level, and I knew Chris by name, but I had never met him.”

Wiles and LaCivita had what they now laughingly call work “dates” with Fabrizio in the mix to see if they clicked. “When I decided we did, then I invited him to meet the president. He comes to Mar-a-Lago, goes out and buys a new suit, got his shoes shined, and comes for dinner.”

It wasn’t a perfect first meeting. It was just one of those days when Trump was not happy. “And I said to the president, ‘Well, Chris made the Swift Boat ads,’” Wiles said. “And [Trump] said, ‘Everybody says they made the Swift Boat ads. You didn’t make the Swift Boat ads. Everybody claims credit for that.’”

Wiles said she approached Trump again a few days later about LaCivita. “I really think he’s the guy,” she said. Trump told her, “If that’s what you want, it’s fine with me. Just do it.”

“Chris walked in the door, thinking he was going to have another dinner, hopefully more pleasant,” Wiles said. “And the president said, ‘Look, she wants you. If she wants you, I want you. Susie, you go negotiate the money thing and welcome him to the team.’”

“That was it,” she added. “And when you think about it, it’s such a Donald Trump thing.”

LaCivita was working on Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) reelection bid. He came on board right after that race ended.

LaCivita and Wiles are opposites in many ways, yet their partnership worked. “That’s what I know best in politics, particularly at the level we just finished,” Wiles said. “I don’t think it’s ever happened before where there was really a partnership that worked, and he likes and is good at everything I’m not, and I like and am good at everything he’s not.”

Wiles said presidential campaigns are “just so big and so multifaceted that it’s hard for me to conceive of one person really doing it all by themselves.”

So, it was just common sense that they became co-campaign managers.

“But it could have gone wrong in many ways. And it did not,” Wiles said. “In fact, we are better friends today than when we started.”

An observer who saw the two of them dozens of times on the campaign trail said you could see their genuine respect and affection for each other. It was something you never see in the politics business.

Wiles laughed. “No, you don’t. And he doesn’t want anybody to know it,” she said. “He has a gentle side. He doesn’t want anybody to know that he is a wonderful husband. His wife, Catherine, is fantastic. He’s a great dad. He’s very proud of his children. And so those kinds of values we both share.”

LaCivita and Wiles spent much of their time together with Trump. But on July 13, Wiles was with Trump as he headed to Butler, Pennsylvania. LaCivita was in Milwaukee, where Trump was heading the next day to commence the Republican National Convention. Then came the assassination attempt that changed everything.

LaCivita was watching the rally in his hotel suite but was distracted by a staffer with a minor crisis. His door was open so staff could go in and out as needed. LaCivita’s daughter Victoria, who was working the convention, burst through the door to tell him Trump had been shot.

LaCivita has a reputation for being stoic in emergencies. He quickly assessed the situation — yes, there was blood trickling down the side of Trump’s face, but he was standing, so that was a good sign. LaCivita watched the Secret Service agent who had grabbed the ex-president by the collar, and he seemed calm — another good sign.

LaCivita quickly dialed Wiles. “What the hell?”

Wiles, who was getting into the car with Trump as they headed to the hospital, promised to call back.

It took two hours for them to connect. “We ultimately go back to the FBO, and it looks like we’re in the middle of a war zone,” Wiles said. “Everybody has their long gun drawn, and people that I know and they know me are looking at me funny. It was a strange environment.”

“He’s sobbing, sobbing,” Wiles said of her phone call with LaCivita. “He knew that the president was OK. But he was guilt-ridden that he wasn’t there.”

LaCivita said his friendship with Wiles had only strengthened in the six months since the campaign ended.

LaCivita recently visited Wiles, now the White House chief of staff, in the West Wing. He did things he could not imagine while growing up on Jefferson Street. It was a pinch-yourself moment, LaCivita admitted, the culmination of a 35-year career.

“And to be just a small part of that, and then to be able to go to the White House and talk with the president and at the Oval next to the Resolute desk, and then the ride on Air Force One, those are such amazing, rare opportunities for any person,” he said.

LaCivita said Allen once told him while passing the illuminated Capitol dome on their way back from a reception, “If that view ever stops giving you goose bumps, it’s time to get out.”

“I’ve never stopped getting goose bumps,” LaCivita said.

The ballroom at the Wyndham was packed to the rafters, with over 800 people coming to see McCormick honor LaCivita for his accomplishment. Just before LaCivita was called up to accept the honors, Trump’s familiar face appeared at the center of the room on a screen, sitting at the Resolute desk.

“Chris, I know firsthand that you are an absolute warrior, an exceptional patriot, one of the greatest fighters in American politics, and I will tell you, you were by my side, and we won the presidency. That’s all we can say that has to be said. Other than that, of course, you’ve learned how to fight from the very best: the United States Marine Corps. You bravely served our nation in uniform, and as of last July, we now have something in common: We have both taken a bullet for our country. But I want to thank you not only for your extraordinary service on our campaign, which was just leadership and brilliance, but to take back the White House. We did something very special. It was decades of political trenches fighting to defend America, and you learned a lot, and you gave me that knowledge. You should be incredibly proud of all you’ve accomplished. It’s an honor to call you a friend, and really was an unbelievable honor to work with you toward our big victory in the presidency. Congratulations. Enjoy yourself and have a great life.”

LaCivita’s mother reached over to hold his hand. A wave of emotion washed over his face.

“I would’ve never expected anything like that. I am a professional,” LaCivita said. “Everyone likes to be thanked. I don’t have to be, and the thanks is in accomplishing the mission and being a part of a team of people and the lasting friendships that I have — those are the most important things to me.”

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“It was that much more touching for my mother to be able to experience it as well because I’m sure there were times in her life where she probably didn’t know what I was doing,” he added.

LaCivita acknowledged, “Politics is a very tough, rough, and tumble business, and you don’t often get to share these kinds of moments with anyone the older you get. It’s harder and harder to find those opportunities to be able to share them with your parents.”

“And if you have your parents, you’re lucky,” he added. “I just have my mother now, but I know my dad is extremely proud.”

Salena Zito is a national political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.