The Florida Governor's currently suspended presidential campaign is offering an opportunity for those who were part of the effort to sound off about what went wrong.
Former speechwriter Nate Hochman left the Ron DeSantis campaign in July and reportedly was let go after he shared a video with DeSantis's face superimposed on a "Sonnenrad," a symbol used by the German Nazi party.
Months after the dissociation, Hochman is having his say about that incident, and about the campaign writ large in The American Conservative.
Regarding the Sonnenrad, he writes that what is "true is that I retweeted a video containing what I would later come to learn was a Sonnenrad and immediately un-retweeted said video and alerted my superiors on the campaign staff when I learned what the symbol meant."
"From there, the reporting graduated to the claim that I made the video and then to the speculation that I had also made an anti-LGBT video that had landed the campaign in hot water weeks prior. That reporting was categorically false," Hochman said, though he is polite enough not to blame his former colleagues on that campaign for failing to correct reporting that wasn't true.
The iconography of the campaign certainly didn't help DeSantis, but Hochman points to other problems with the candidate and the operation, including what the videos associated with him and other such edgelord memes said about the campaign's failure to connect with voters or even project the image of the "real" DeSantis.
"The Twitter videos that were publicly linked to my exit from the campaign were part and parcel of the increasingly extreme, and haphazard, attempts to substitute ideology for authenticity. If DeSantis could get as far to Trump's right as possible, the thinking went, then the mystical hold Trump possessed over his voter base could be broken. This betrayed a subtle but fundamental misunderstanding of human nature — a conception of the average voter as homo ideologicus, driven by formal philosophical commitments."
Hochman argues that "the underwhelming — at times, downright embarrassing — way DeSantis prosecuted his case teaches many lessons about what has become of the set of institutions that we used to call 'movement conservatism' and the increasingly apparent chasm between those institutions and the broader political forces animating the Republican Party."
Helping to undermine the Governor's case, Hochman admits, were DeSantis' tics that did not translate to the scrutiny of the national stage. "There was the odd laugh; the bright-white rain boots; the 'leg-lengthening footwear'; the nose-wiping video clip; and an endless number of weird facial expressions and awkward interactions with the public."
Compounding these failures was a campaign team that seemed unable to guide its candidate to making a remotely compelling case.
"The MAGA offensive against DeSantis was a one-sided war. There was little to no attempt to stage a counteroffensive because the DeSantis team failed to grasp the terms of the battle. The way DeSantis made the case for himself had all the same flaws. His pitch to Republican voters was often described as 'Trumpism without (Donald) Trump,' 'Trump without the drama,' 'Trump but competent,' and so on. It would be more accurate to call it a technocrat's Trumpism," Hochman said.
"The issue set was substantively similar. The distinction was drawn along the lines of administrative ability. DeSantis would rattle off his impressive policy achievements like he was reading a grocery list — check, check, check — before concluding that we needed someone who could 'get the job done.' A senior staffer, in a moment of private frustration, described him to me as 'the Home Depot candidate.'"
Hochman notes that he had one interaction with DeSantis that wasn't stilted in March 2023, when he was in his "first week as a speechwriter on the Florida governor's as-of-then unannounced presidential campaign."
"I suggested he talk about trade policy in an upcoming New Hampshire speech. He laughed — a real laugh, revealing a brief, transitory glimpse of a man with an actual sense of humor — at a joke I made about fundraising emails. I thanked him for the opportunity, shook his hand, and walked out of the office and back to my desk."
Will other DeSantis alums offer their own campaign confessionals? And will Hochman's former colleagues offer their own takes on the man they all thought would be President roughly a year ago?
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