By Jeffrey Blehar
Sunday, May 31, 2026
What have we learned at this point about Graham Platner,
presumptive Democratic candidate for Senate in the high-stakes race against
Susan Collins in Maine? Mainers — and the national media — were certainly sold one story about
Platner: that of an antiwar Marine during the Iraq War, a hardscrabble
oysterman, and a working-class straight talker.
And then, one by one, we discovered that each of these biographical points were,
when not outright false, distorted beyond all recognition. It turns out that
Platner, who frequently accuses Senator Collins of “voting to send him to
Iraq,” actively volunteered two years after the United States declared war
because — in his own words, later hastily erased from Reddit — “I wanted to
have an adventure and kill some people.” (He hated the job so much he later
signed up with Blackwater as a mercenary to go to Afghanistan.) It turns out
that his vaunted oyster farm’s biggest customer is his mother, who buys his tiny haul for
her restaurant.
Platner boasts of being a “working-class guy living a
working-class life,” but a New York Times investigation into his background
earlier this month revealed that he was in fact the rich and downwardly mobile
progeny of upper-class wealth, a man who attended one of the most expensive and elite private schools in America — but only
for a year, before transferring to a different private school. He is and
has always been financially supported by his parents, who bought his house for
him and keep him in “business,” such as it is. In other words, he’s a failson
turning to politics in his idle frustration. (It is a story familiar to many upper-class families.)
And then, of course, there’s the whole problem of the
Nazi death’s head he tattooed across his chest at the age of 20 and proudly
kept right up until the moment it became public knowledge last November. You
know the details of the story already — this, taken with the many
“Nazi-curious” acts scattered throughout his known life to date, would have
instantly disqualified him from running for office in any sane world, but
sanity left the 2026 electoral cycle long ago.
Now, the latest scandal emerges, and it’s quite the
doozy. It turns out that earlier in the spring of 2025, mere months before he
declared his candidacy, Graham Platner was caught by his wife juggling as many as six separate sexting
relationships with other people. From the New York Times:
Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner,
told a senior campaign aide that he had been exchanging sexual messages with
multiple other women.
It was the kind of revelation
with the potential to damage the political newcomer just as his campaign to
unseat Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, was beginning to resonate with
voters, especially in a state where female voters make up a large share of the
electorate.
Mr. Platner’s exchanges with
women were confirmed by current and former campaign officials, who gave
different accounts of some of the details. Ms. Gertner said the couple, who had
married in November 2023, according to the town clerk of Sullivan, Maine, was
working through his indiscretions in marriage counseling.
Democrats were already concerned enough about having to
back a man who proudly tattooed a Nazi death’s head across his chest and kept
it even after the moment he decided he wanted to run for Senate as a
progressive leftist. But what will they do if they find themselves politically
committed to an actual moral monster? What if there are worse and more reckless
things in the world than tattooing a totenkopf on your right breast?
Because you need to understand: I’m not talking about
Graham Platner’s marriage difficulties here. That’s what the story (also
covered in similar detail by the Wall Street Journal, suggesting both were working
from the same sourcing simultaneously) is nominally about. But as disgusting as
Platner’s treatment of his new wife was, it’s the sort of story we’ve all
encountered before in politics. It should harm him with voters, but I
can’t tell the voters of Maine what to think any more than I could convince
Texas Republicans not to nominate Jabba the Hutt for Senate.
I do, however, think they’ll be turned off by the sight
of a
nude Platner, wrapped only in a towel, posing just perfectly for his
profile pic on an app called “Kik” to conceal the giant Nazi tattoo on his
chest. (Remember: He claims he had no idea it was a hate symbol.) And this
detail brings us to another problem: I want to know why an adult male would
have a Kik account.
The Journal reported that Platner “has an active
account on Kik . . . a messaging
platform that has been widely used for sexual encounters.” The campaign told
the paper that the candidate “had long deleted the app from his phone but
hadn’t deactivated his account.”
Kik is known as a place for teenagers to speak
anonymously and has
faced scrutiny over incidents of sexual exploitation over the years. The Journal
does not elaborate on Platner’s use of the platform — but the obvious question
is raised: Why did he turn to this particular app?
As a secondary question: These new stories are primarily
coming from (and being confirmed by) Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former
political director, who resigned in October. McDonald was the person charged
with doing “internal oppo” on Platner — the normal vetting process whereby a
campaign frankly assesses all of their candidate’s potential personal and
political weaknesses. And as all of these stories about Platner’s personal
rottenness drip forth, all with immaculate sourcing and ironclad claims, I begin
to ask myself: What remaining skeletons could possibly
be hiding in Graham Platner’s closet that would make McDonald not only quit
his campaign, but also potentially dynamite her own career in order to tell the
truth about him? What are we about to find out next about Graham Platner?
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