Assuaging the Graham Platner Guilt Complex

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 01, 2026

 

It wasn’t just the existence of the Waffen SS tattoo on Graham Platner’s chest that raised questions about his judgment. It was the way we learned about it.

 

“My Totenkopf,” as Platner allegedly referred to it, according to an anonymous acquaintance who related a troubling 2012 exchange with the candidate to reporters, was revealed to the public by his former campaign director. Former state Representative Genevieve McDonald told the Bangor Daily News about the offending mark following her resignation from the campaign after warning that it “could be problematic.”

 

That was just one of what has become a cavalcade of Platner’s judgmental lapses.

 

There were the reams of roguish remarks posted to online forums in which he called rural American whites “stupid” and “racist,” blamed women for inviting their own sexual assaults, and called himself a “communist” well into his 30s.

 

Platner stressed that he suffered from post-traumatic stress following his service in combat with the U.S. military, and he had since undergone therapy. But in those dark years, Platner also fetishized violence as a remedy to domestic political disputes. Platner’s alleged affiliation with the radical Maine Socialist Rifle Association calls into question just how flip those comments were, as does his defense of those remarks in an interview with the New York Times. “We didn’t beat the Nazis with smiles,” he said. “I would say it’s still true; historically, fascism has been beaten with armed resistance and conflict.”

 

Even during his Senate campaign, Platner demonstrated his penchant for indiscretion when he boosted the signal on notorious antisemitic conspiracy theorist Stew Peters merely because Peters echoed his own paranoid, quasi-isolationist campaign themes.

 

So, it came as no surprise to Platner’s clear-eyed critics when it was revealed over the weekend that the candidate’s recklessness extended to his interpersonal relationships. According to the New York Times, Platner’s wife recently confessed that her husband “had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women” — as many as six women, in fact, but possibly more.

 

Platner’s defenders are casting about for scapegoats in the effort to absolve their man of guilt. One easy go-to is to claim that the Jews are to blame:

 

 

That’s one way to rationalize steadfast support for a man whose consistent imprudence disqualifies him for service in the nation’s foremost deliberative body. Another is to own the guilt of it all, but to blame everyone else for the moral conundrum they’re struggling to navigate.

 

The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell articulated a version of this back in March as Democrats struggled to popularize Maine Governor Janet Mills as a more conventional alternative to the scandal-ridden Platner. Democrats, she insisted, “are no longer willing to engage the asymmetry of them denouncing bad behavior while republicans consistently excuse it.” After all, “if Susan Collins is gonna hold onto her red MAGA hat,” she concluded, “I don’t think you’ll find Maine Dems particularly sensitive to her/your criticisms on Platner.”

 

Implicit in that line of thinking is the notion that the uncritical embrace of Platner is wrong. It’s just a wrong that, within the context of all the other wrongs with which we’re surrounded, can be compartmentalized, diminished, and, ultimately, waved away.

 

Those rationalizations have been on full display in recent weeks. They’re predicated on the degree to which Donald Trump and his political faction represent the graver threat as well as the dubious notion that Platner is a vehicle for a larger political project: namely, reclaiming the white working class for the Democratic Party.

 

“Voters want candidates who are authentically themselves—warts and all,” Longwell wrote last month of the sentiment conveyed by her focus groups. “In fact, a candidate’s vices have started to become markers of authenticity.” Will this latest scandal shake Maine Democrats of their enthusiasm for Platner? Longwell isn’t sure. After all, “the voters in Maine we’ve listened to really did not care” about his many previous improprieties.

 

Indeed, why would they when they already have a ready-made rationale for ignoring them? Platner is creating a “heterodox” coalition. He’s exposing the GOP’s “ruse of pretending to be a working-class party” and dragging “them into the conflict with oligarchy they’ve been trying to avoid.” And because it is “absolutely critical that the Democrats figure out how in the f*** to win working-class white people if they ever want to have power or control again,” the Bulwark’s Tim Miller observed, we must presumably subordinate our own better judgment to the political moment. “Is Graham Platner the magic potion to that?” he asked. “We don’t know. But it’s worth a try.”

 

If winning is all that matters, the Platner experiment hasn’t failed yet. But the Democratic Party’s leading lights spent the weekend hedging their bets. In defeat, the ethical compromises so many are talking themselves into today will seem ill-considered in retrospect. But what if Platner still manages to pull off a victory in November? Some Democrats are probably beginning to ask themselves what exactly they will have voted for themselves once the thrill of reveling in Republicans’ defeat fades.

 

Having spent the last decade condemning the GOP for subordinating their integrity to political pragmatism, Democratic partisans are signing themselves up for the same torment. In their quieter moments, some of them just have to be wondering: Is it really worth it?