A video featuring Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis haloed by the Nazi sonnenrad emblem was publicized on Twitter by a campaign staffer earlier this week, and the campaign has now fired him after learning he was also its creator. Axios summarizes:
Nate Hochman, a speechwriter on the DeSantis campaign and a former writer for National Review, created the video on his own and shared it through a pro-DeSantis Twitter account, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Hochman then retweeted the video, but it was deleted shortly afterward. “Nate Hochman is no longer with the campaign. And we will not be commenting on him further,” a DeSantis campaign official told Axios.
Semafor first reported Tuesday evening that Hochman had been fired.
Why it matters: The controversial video and Hochman’s dismissal are the latest instances of internal disorder inside the DeSantis campaign, which announced Tuesday it was firing over a third of its team amid a cash crunch.
That Axios’s thinks “why it matters” is “campaign disorder” rather than “campaign used Nazi symbolism” is a stark intance of the newsroom precept that politics is a meaningless race with no consequences for anyone but the horses.