By Jim Geraghty
Friday, May 01, 2026
The fact that the guy with the Nazi tattoo has now
effectively won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary before the voting even
started prompted a great deal of dark humor from me yesterday in the Corner, on X, and in yesterday’s
Three Martini Lunch episode.
But as my colleague Phil Klein reminds us, Graham Platner’s de facto
primary win is dark, depressing, and sad. You can make a compelling argument
that antisemitism was actually Platner’s biggest strength in the short-lived
Democratic Senate primary:
On another
occasion, he promoted a social media post from the neo-Nazi Holocaust denier
Stew Peters, and he also sat for a lengthy interview with antisemitic conspiracy theorist Nate
Cornacchia, claiming he was a longtime fan. He has also described the
U.S.-Israel relationship as “shameful”
and praised a violent Hamas attack on Israel in 2014.
Two years ago, nobody had ever heard of this guy. He’s
not remarkably accomplished. (As the new NRSC ad illustrates, he actually comes
from a privileged background; his dad bought him a house.) In his early
appearances, it was clear he didn’t know how the Senate appropriations process works.
Out of nowhere, seemingly apolitical magazines like Bon Appetit started
publishing glowing soft-focus profiles about this guy.
But there’s also something absurd about the rapid rise of
Platner after the revelation in October that he had a death’s-head tattoo of
the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) on his chest for 18 years.
“It was not until I started hearing from reporters and
D.C. insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol,” Platner
said when the controversy emerged. “I absolutely would not have gone through
life having this on my chest if I knew that — and to insinuate that I did is
disgusting.” That is not how all of Platner’s old acquaintances remember it, and
his former political director said he had told her he had a “problematic”
tattoo in the summer of last year.
A glowing New
Yorker profile of Platner described the candidate as “a precocious
reader, Graham devoured books on military history, especially the American
Civil War, and watched Ken Burn’s documentary series about the conflict on
television.” It would seem a bit odd that a military history buff would look in
the mirror for 18 years and never recognize the symbol of the SS — recognizable
to anyone who’s watched any World War II movie, or the hilarious “are we the
baddies” British comedy sketch.
(This situation does remind me of the scene
from Succession, where Tom Wambsgans asks news anchor Mark Ravenhead
about his curious and very particular interests in World War II history and
keeps getting answers that never quite reassure him.)
Back in October, Luke Winkie of Slate offered the
kind of recoiling shock that ideally would manifest all across the political
spectrum — not just at Platner, but at other political figures such as Paul
Ingrassia, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel,
who, in his own words, declared that he had a “Nazi streak.”
Even the most
charitable reading of the sequence of events — an idiot accidentally signs up
for a Nazi tattoo, and celebrates its edginess for years before having a change
of heart — is tough to swallow. It’s the kind of baggage that poisons every
aspect of one’s political project. Are you really going to reprimand Trump’s
fascist leanings with a totenkopf on your chest? Do you really think you’re the
one to advocate for more humane treatment of Palestinians? There is an
attitude, among Democrats, that we must be more amenable to voices that don’t
fit neatly within the confines of the platform. That we need to be less
preachy, and administer fewer purity tests. Where do we draw the line of who
gets invited into the big tent? I’ve got an idea. How about we draw the line at
Nazi tattoos? I think we can all agree on that.
Amen, man.
But you will not see — hey, I didn’t even intend that one
— left-of-center voices express anything like Winkie’s words above between now
and Election Day. It’s become verboten. (I did it again!) Every other interest
must be sublimated to the ultimate goal of defeating those menacing extremist
Republicans, who many Democrats would insist are the real fascists, including,
in this particular case . . . Susan Collins. (Her lifetime
ACU rating, 43 out of 100.)
From Barry Goldwater to today, Democratic officials and
their allies have unfairly called Republicans Nazis with metronomic regularity,
usually spurred by routine political differences. Former President George W.
Bush was compared to Hitler by progressive activists, middle school teachers, The Nation magazine, CounterPunch, Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks, former Al
Gore adviser Naomi Wolf and others.
Sadly, yes, some idiots on the right did the same for
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld wrote, “Everyone seems to
have become Hitler.” Comparing a mainstream Democratic Party figure to Hitler
is wrong, historically illiterate, and does damage to our public discourse.
It’s not like a Democratic president would ever round up members of a particular
ethnic group and put them into camps. . . . I mean, it’s not like a Democratic president would ever round up members of a
particular ethnic group and put them into camps again.
Besides, everyone knows you’re supposed to compare
mainstream Democratic Party figures to Josef Stalin. I kid, I kid! The only
person seriously calling Graham Platner a communist around here is . . .
(checks notes) himself.
But that was a long time ago, in . . . 2021. It was an immature, youthful
indiscretion at age 37.
(Somebody out there who thinks he’s clever is going to
ask, “So, which one is it, Jim? Are you saying that Platner is a closet Nazi,
or a secret communist?” Ask the Polish whether the Nazis and communists have ever worked together towards common goals.)
The notion that any Republican pro-Israel advocate for
limited government is hard to distinguish from history’s greatest antisemitic
totalitarian authoritarian monster is, if not quite mainstream thought in the
Democratic Party, not all that rare, either.
But along comes Platner, and suddenly Democrats will line up
to go on record and insist that there’s no reason to believe the guy with
the SS Totenkopf tattoo could ever have past or current sympathies to the
Nazis.
For a while there, the “okay” hand gesture was listed as a “symbol of hate” and
something that could put you under suspicion of being a closeted white
nationalist, but getting a tattoo of a symbol of the SS on your chest is
now allegedly no reason for suspicion. It illuminates the degree to which many
players on our political scene use the term “Nazi” as a synonym for “someone I
disagree with at the moment.”
But there’s another side of yesterday’s development. The
Washington Post’s Liz Goodwin and Patrick Marley remember that there was a
time, less than two years ago, when Mills was considered the bold new voice of
Democratic resistance.
She was thinking
of walking out of the bipartisan gathering of governors when Trump abruptly
asked her whether she would comply with his recent executive order banning
transgender female athletes from participating on girls’ and women’s sports
teams.
“I’m complying
with state and federal law,” she answered.
“We are the
federal law,” Trump retorted, in a line that Mills thought sounded more like a
king than a president. “You better comply because otherwise you’re not getting
any federal funding.”
Mills replied
calmly: “See you in court.”
A first-time Senate candidate in her late 70s was never
going to be an easy sell, and it was made even more difficult after the
disastrous end of Biden’s presidency. But what’s intriguing is how quickly
Maine’s Democratic primary voters — at least those answering the phone for
pollsters and making donations to candidates — concluded Mills was unacceptable
because they associated her with “lawyerly restraint” and with not being a
bomb-thrower. Mills’s reputation went from being the exciting new favorite of the
anti-Trump Democratic grassroots — and a favorite target of Trump’s anger — to an allegedly
milquetoast compromiser within a span of about eleven months or so.
But Mills didn’t change that much. (Septuagenarians don’t
change much at all, I find.) What changed in that span was the Maine Democratic
grassroots’ sense of what a “fighter” ought to be.
Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New York Times today,
about Maine Democrats’ enthusiastic support for Platner:
There’s a
widespread hunger in the country for populists and outsiders, and ordinary
people don’t always think in the same ideological terms as pundits. As America
slips deeper into social and economic crisis — likely to be exacerbated by the
job-killing effects of artificial intelligence — the electorate might gravitate
toward leaders offering far-reaching solutions.
I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like hearing
the term “far-reaching solution” when discussing a guy with a Nazi tattoo.
Progressive columnist Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, back on April 14:
If anything, the
furor* over the “Nazi tattoo” probably helps Platner in a weird way, as voters
are rebelling against those despised elites trying to police what’s acceptable
and telling them whom they can vote for. He has only risen in the polls since the
first report about the Totenkopf.
Yeah, that reflexive, unthinking attitude toward any
criticism of an outsider candidate is stupid. If saying that you shouldn’t vote
for a guy who has a Nazi tattoo and an implausible story about how he
“accidentally” got it and somehow never noticed it makes me one of those
“despised elites trying to police what’s acceptable and telling them whom they
can vote for,” then fine, I guess I’m a despised elite.
*See, Bunch is doing it too!
ADDENDUM: Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie
Raskin, February 3, 2023: “This is obviously a profoundly
gerrymandered and jerry-rigged Supreme Court.”
Raskin, March 5, 2024: “We don’t expect much more from a
right-wing court that’s been structured and gerrymandered to give precisely
these kinds of rulings.”
Raskin,
last night: “The Supreme Court has been gerrymandered, itself.”
I’m going to assume that Raskin knows what gerrymandering
is, and how it is the redrawing of district lines to maximize an advantage in
legislative elections. You can’t “gerrymander” the Supreme Court because the
judges are not picked based upon geographic divisions; each one is appointed by
the president, must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and once on the Supreme
Court, makes decisions that affect the whole country.
What Raskin means is that he doesn’t like the decisions
from the six conservative/strict constructionist/originalist Supreme Court
justices, and he wishes to persuade the public that they are illegitimate. All
of the current justices were properly and legally nominated and confirmed by
the U.S. Senate. Raskin knows that his target audience thinks “gerrymandering”
is bad, and if he tells people that the Court is “gerrymandered,” people might
believe that it is somehow illegitimate.
This is the level of discourse we have in this country.
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