In 2023, a young speechwriter for the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida suffered a seemingly devastating career setback.
Within days of Nate Hochman’s promotion of a pro-DeSantis video that flashed an image embraced by white supremacists, public outcry grew, and he was among a group of staff members fired by the campaign.
But Mr. Hochman’s career was not over. Within a year, he was making videos with America 2100, a right-wing advocacy group with ties to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Then came a stint working for a Republican senator on Capitol Hill.
This year, Mr. Hochman took a position as a senior aide to one of most powerful figures in the federal government. He joined the State Department under Mr. Rubio and now works as deputy director of the agency’s policy planning office. According to Mr. Hochman’s email signature, he is also Mr. Rubio’s chief speechwriter.
Mr. Hochman did not respond to a request for comment.
“Nate Hochman is a trusted and key member of the department who has worked tirelessly to advance the president’s foreign policy agenda,” Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement.
Mr. Hochman’s trajectory is far from unique in today’s Washington. He has joined the growing ranks of those who have found that a public controversy — even one associated with a high-profile dismissal — is not disqualifying for entry into the top ranks of the Trump administration.
His appointment follows the hiring or attempted hiring of multiple State Department officials during Mr. Trump’s second term who have espoused inflammatory opinions or been entangled in controversies involving race and ethnicity. One of them is Darren Beattie, a senior adviser in the department on Brazil policy. Mr. Beattie was fired as a speechwriter for the first Trump White House after giving a talk at a conference attended by white nationalists.
Jeremy Carl, a political commentator and Claremont Institute fellow named by President Trump to a top State Department post, withdrew his nomination in March after senators questioned him at a hearing about his views on “white erasure.” Mr. Carl has also been accused of making antisemitic comments. He has said he is not a white nationalist.
When making personnel decisions, the current administration’s tolerance for individuals who have made controversial comments on race and identity has not been limited to the State Department.
After chat logs leaked late last year showing that Paul Ingrassia had made racist comments and admitted to having a “Nazi streak in me,” he withdrew his nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel. But soon afterward, President Trump named him deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, where he now serves as acting general counsel.
Mr. Hochman’s arc started after he graduated from Colorado College in 2021. He quickly became a rising star in the conservative movement, landing a writing position at National Review, working as a fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute and contributing to the opinion pages of The New York Times.
But Mr. Hochman soon came under fire after offering measured praise of white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s influence on young men in an online discussion. Mr. Hochman lost a journalism fellowship after the exchange was reported in The Dispatch.
“The fact that kids are listening to you, there are good things and bad things about it. But the fact that you have said super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can accomplish in politics,” Mr. Hochman told Mr. Fuentes, according to the publication.
Mr. Hochman told The Dispatch he disagreed with Mr. Fuentes’s worldview and had “said some really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe.”
He joined the communication team for Mr. DeSantis’s campaign in 2023. That July, Mr. Hochman shared on X a video containing a Sonnenrad, a circular symbol popularized in Nazi Germany and more recently associated with white supremacy movements.
The video includes images of a popular meme character reading headlines critical of Mr. Trump, juxtaposed with the character reading contrasting news about Mr. DeSantis. The clip ends with an image of Mr. DeSantis’s face superimposed on the Sonnenrad as soldiers march across the screen.
In an essay published the following year, Mr. Hochman said he did not create the video, pushing back on assertions that an “ethnically Jewish kid with no prior video editing experience was cranking out neo-Nazi videos under the cover of night.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Hochman was among the first people to repost the video after it went live on an anonymous account on X used by the campaign’s communications team to distribute memes and other messages.
In his essay, Mr. Hochman said that he undid the repost and informed his supervisors once he learned what the symbol meant. He refused to discuss who had made and distributed the video, saying he wished to avoid the “risk of throwing friends under the bus.”
After the DeSantis campaign, Mr. Hochman worked for America 2100. The group was founded by Michael Needham, who had served as chief of staff to Mr. Rubio when he was a senator and later became a top aide at the State Department and the White House.
While at America 2100, Mr. Hochman appeared in a series of videos interviewing residents of Charleroi, Pa., about the influx of Haitian immigrants there. In one, a local man claims the volume of Haitians coming to the community had overwhelmed the sewage system.
“That’s gnarly,” Mr. Hochman said in the video. “The whole strip now basically just intermittently smells like human feces. Awesome.”
Mr. Hochman subsequently served as a policy adviser for Senator Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri. He left that position earlier this year, according to LegiStorm, a research group that tracks congressional employees. A spokeswoman for Mr. Schmitt did not return request for comment.
Mr. Hochman then took on a senior position in the State Department. As of June, Mr. Hochman was listed in a federal database as a senior adviser in the office of the counselor.
And in his current position as deputy director of policy planning, he works in an important office that advises the secretary on broad policy directions. Mr. Hochman has also served as the secretary’s speechwriter since at least July, according to documentation reviewed by The Times. It is not clear which speeches Mr. Hochman has written for Mr. Rubio in that capacity.
Mr. Hochman has amplified multiple posts on X by Mr. Rubio and the State Department’s official account to his roughly 70,000 followers, including those asserting that Cuba has ties to left-wing extremism. His profile on the social media site does not disclose his employment at the agency.
Stephanie Nolen contributed reporting. Georgia Gee contributed research.
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