The Party With the Nazi Tattoo

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

I honestly never expected to hear Chuck Schumer announce that he and the rest of the official Democratic Party apparatus would hereby spend millions of dollars to elect a man with a literal Nazi tattoo on his body and a trail of Hamas fandom on his Internet history.

 

But perhaps that’s on me—my expectations were too high.

 

Because that’s what happened today. Graham Platner, a man who makes excuses for political violence, obsesses about the Jews and their supposed nefarious influence on public life, and who according to acquaintances and former employees laughed and bragged about his Nazi tattoo for years, has the full weight of the the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee behind him, as well as the pledged loyalty of the party’s Senate floor leader, who is Jewish.

 

“After years of allowing Trump’s abuses of power, Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her,” the Democratic leadership said in a statement after Platner’s only competition for the Democratic nomination, the well-liked moderate governor Janet Mills, suspended her campaign.

 

Susan Collins, the incumbent, is the very definition of a moderate Republican. Collins isn’t making Schumer back the Nazi Tattoo Guy; Collins is, in fact, a great excuse not to back the Nazi Tattoo Guy. Not that Chuck Schumer should need an excuse to decline to back Platner. This one’s easy.

 

Platner certainly hasn’t toned down the Jew-baiting or conspiracist pronouncements about Israel controlling America to siphon taxpayer money away from working families. It’s his whole brand. And one can expect it to continue now that Schumer is approving of that brand.

 

One need not be Jewish to understand that Nazis are bad. The moral failure here is the Democratic Party’s, not a single constituency.

 

That’s not to say there are no Democrats who know right from wrong. For example, Platner recently characterized Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania as “the bane of my existence”—the latest in a long line of reasons to admire Fetterman, who has made no secret of his disdain for Jew-baiters with Nazi tattoos.

 

There are the rare progressive activists with a conscience as well. Gun-control advocate Shannon Watts, who has been railing against the left’s support for Platner and its giddy embrace of anti-Semitic influencer Hasan Piker, tweeted today to remind everyone that Piker praised Platner by saying: “He was pro-Hamas. He was giving Hamas credit in 2014. What more do you f**king want?”

 

Apparently many in the party were convinced by that argument—made by a guy who, by the way, said America deserved 9/11 and is enthralled by political violence more generally.

 

In 2016, when Donald Trump refused CNN’s entreaties to reject support from the Ku Klux Klan, I joked on social media “The KKK took my party away,” a play on the famous Ramones song “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” Trump’s opposition clearly took his shameful moment as a blueprint for attracting the people they consider the white working class, and here we are.

 

That evolution (or devolution, really) speaks to the rise in mainstream political radicalism in America. It also speaks to a kind of thirsty adolescence that characterizes too much of the political class these days. In order to appeal to those they consider the cool kids, Democrats have been cursing like sailors for a few years now. Dignity, they have come to believe, is a surefire electoral loser.

 

Are they wrong? The race to the bottom in American politics is a fierce competition these days. The frightening part here is that Platner ought to be the bottom, and he clearly isn’t.

 

What comes next? What other stations will this circus train be rolling in to?

 

Maine voters will still have their say in November, of course. But by then Platner’s party’s leaders will be on to the next degrading scheme. Because, again, if this isn’t the bottom, then the bottom doesn’t exist.