Donald Trump and the "Vision Thing"

An essay published last week by a Ron DeSantis campaign staffer helps explain what really gave the former president his edge against the Florida governor

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on February 17, 2024 in Waterford, Michigan. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

For a guy still in his mid-20s, Nate Hochman sure has lived a lot of life.

A 2021 graduate of Colorado College, where he studied with one of the country’s leading experts in the thought of British conservative Michael Oakeshott, Hochman has held internships, fellowships, or jobs at such right-leaning organizations as the American Enterprise Institute, National Review, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Claremont Institute, and the presidential campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

If you’re on the right yourself—or make a habit of reading long analytical op-eds in the New York Times about it—you’ve probably seen his byline. Otherwise, you may recognize his name because of stories from last July about a staffer in the DeSantis campaign’s communications shop who was let go after sharing on social media a video containing a Nazi symbol. That was Hochman.

(Some reporting at the time identified Hochman as the person who made the video. He categorically denies this and claims to have had nothing to do with it—or the creation of an earlier, flagrantly homophobic pro-DeSantis video—though he certainly did his best to help promote both, at least until he learned the meaning of the “black sun” imagery deployed by whichever of his colleagues on the campaign was responsible for the second spot.)

Now Hochman has written an essay for The American Conservative about his experience of working for DeSantis, and it’s very much worth reading—though not because it fulfills the expectations set by its title: “What I Saw Inside the DeSantis Campaign.” There’s actually very little in the piece that Hochman couldn’t have written about the Florida Governor’s failed presidential bid based entirely on observing it from the outside. If you’re looking for behind-the-scenes gossip or dirt, you won’t find it here.

What you’ll find instead is Hochman’s assessment of what DeSantis and his team did wrong—and, by contrast, what the Trump campaign that pulverized it did right. In a word, Hochman thinks DeSantis made a mistake in running as a right-wing policy wonk—a sort of anti-woke answer to Elizabeth Warren—while Trump prevailed because of his distinctive “spiritual appeal” to Republican voters. It’s this emphasis on Trump’s mastery of what George H. W. Bush once derided as the “vision thing” that makes Hochman’s essay worth reading and engaging with.

DeSantis Contra Trump

The DeSantis campaign’s case against Trump was based, Hochman claims, on policy and electability: “Trump would float the possibility of executing drug dealers, and DeSantis allies would retort that he had sponsored soft-on-crime legislation as president. Trump would promise to end birthright citizenship by executive fiat, and the DeSantis camp would argue that the proposal was constitutionally dubious or ask why he didn’t do it during his first term.” Of course, DeSantis also frequently made the point that Republicans underperformed in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, and that Trump … didn’t end up continuing to serve as president after the 2020 election. (Hochman doesn’t note the fact that explicitly saying Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden was kind of tricky, given how many GOP voters believe the former president’s lies about the election being stolen from him.)

When it comes to the DeSantis campaign’s case for itself, that was made in purely pragmatic terms.

His pitch to Republican voters was often described as “Trumpism without Trump,” “Trump without the drama,” “Trump but competent,” and so on. It would be more accurate to call it a technocrat’s Trumpism. 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.”

This was, incidentally, the main reason many on the liberal left responded with white-hot rage to my own NYT op-ed from a year ago about how, although DeSantis would make a bad president, a second Trump administration would still be far worse. Over and over I heard the following line from critics: A Trump who can get things done is far more dangerous than one who’s incompetent! Which means these Democrats were speaking the same language as the (at that point) nascent DeSantis campaign. What the Florida governor saw as his greatest strength was exactly what his progressive opponents most feared: what Hochman calls his “ability to execute.”

But according to Hochman, this was evidence of a fatal flaw. DeSantis’ “wonkiness” concealed a “dearth of political vision.”

He talked of “reform,” not revolution; “restoring normalcy” rather than achieving greatness; “sanity” rather than excellence; “getting the country back on the right track” rather than winning the spiritual war for our way of life.

Trump Contra DeSantis

Compared to DeSantis’ pitch, the Trump campaign was “audacious.” In addition to cleverly pushing a “pre-ideological” attack on DeSantis for being personally weird and off-putting—remember the “pudding-fingers” ad?—the former president’s team amped up the Sturm und Drang at every opportunity, portraying the forthcoming election as a moment of national emergency.

For MAGA, 2024 was the final saga of the eight-year-long war for America. The battle lines were clear. The stakes were all or nothing. Red America was besieged on all sides, facing insurmountable odds, outmanned and outgunned by the powerful forces arrayed against them. If they failed, all would be lost, and the America our ancestors fought and died to build would be plunged into darkness. But if they won, they were coming for everything—and those who had orchestrated the destruction of their country would pay dearly for their betrayal. Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state.

This, according to Hochman, is what Republican voters already believe about the country. Trump was doing the politically smart thing by speaking their language. That wasn’t a language of policy, plans, and books. It was a language of feeling, of the heart—one rooted in “loyalty, solidarity, mutual obligation, and a willingness to sacrifice.” That, for Hochman, is “the lifeblood of mass political movements,” which need to be “built upon a politics of common purpose and shared identity.”

Don’t Dare Call It Fascism