Normal People

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 09, 2026

 

Dignity in politics is rare, and dignity in populism rarer still. But if ever there were a moment when a cheap demagogue might feel compelled to muster a little, one would think the end of Platnermania in Maine was it.

 

The candidate had a rape allegation hanging over his head, the worst of many misdeeds of which he’s been accused. He had embarrassed his party, disappointed progressives who believed in him, and put a must-win Senate seat for Democrats at risk. The decent thing to do was acknowledge that he’d lost the people’s trust and affirm that unseating Sen. Susan Collins was more important than his personal ambition. His own advisers recommended it, according to Politico.

 

Malignant narcissists don’t “do” decency, though.

 

What Platner did instead was deliver a mopey 11-minute monologue that can best be described as the speech Donald Trump would have given if the scummy Republican Party had abandoned him in 2016 or 2021, as it should have. Some of the candidate’s vocabulary may have been left-ish, like his references to “structural” pressure and “large forces” being used to push him out of the race, but the message was pure Trump-ese.

 

The system is rigged. “The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.”

 

Fake news. “I learned about this through press inquiries with no time to truly respond, no time for investigations before a corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and executioner.”

 

They’re not after me, they’re after you. I’m just in the way. “We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.”

 

Whiny, selfish, deceitful, obsessed with his own victimhood: It was a populist tour de force. Would it surprise you to learn that the only Republican official in the country who sounds even faintly sympathetic to Platner is Trump himself?

 

I was especially taken with his insinuation that he’s emblematic of “normal people.” In what way, exactly? His upbringing wasn’t “normal.” Platner is a child of privilege whose wealthy parents continued to subsidize him into adulthood. His character isn’t “normal” either, unless we’re treating chronically sleazy behavior—up to and including sexual assault, allegedly—as typical of the working class. Which many leftists do.

 

Even his big claim to blue-collar authenticity, his career as an oysterman, appears to be mostly hype.

 

It’s also curious that a political system that’s supposedly “not built for normal people” has failed to block other left-wing champions of the proletariat from winning elections this year. Zohran Mamdani’s socialist candidates went three-for-three in House primaries in New York City. Melat Kiros unseated longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado. Abdul El-Sayed is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s Senate race.

 

Progressive populists who purport to speak for “normal people” are doing just fine electorally. It’s only the guy with a rape claim and a dozen other scandals hanging around his neck, coincidentally, whom the system conspired to destroy.

 

Trump vs. Platner.

 

Still, Platner is right about one thing.

 

The “system”—that is, the Democratic establishment—wanted him out of the race, and in the end the system got its way. The leaders of the Maine Democratic Party publicly called on him to quit and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee vowed not to spend in Maine if he remained as nominee. When he burbled about the establishment moving to “take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign,” that’s what he was burbling about.

 

Which is ironic. After all, our two major parties are weak and are growing weaker by the day, as Jonah Goldberg frequently points out. There’s no better illustration than Maine itself, where the Democratic establishment went all-in on Gov. Janet Mills in this year’s Senate primary and got its clock cleaned by Platner and the blue oyster cult. The system was vanquished!

 

… until this week, when the DSCC threatened to cut Platner off financially after the rape claim and he folded like a cheap suit. Why is that? Why was the Democratic Party “normal” enough to rid itself of Platner when the Republican Party wasn’t “normal” enough to rid itself of Trump?

 

“Because the right has become a cult of authoritarian sociopaths” is too simplistic an answer, however true it might be.

 

One obvious angle in answering the question has to do with the candidates. Trump was a celebrity in 2016, and not just any kind of celebrity. He was known for being brash, louche, and prone to outrageous showmanship simply for the attention it would bring him—a boorish loudmouthed a–hole, in short. Republican voters knew what they were choosing. You may have found his Access Hollywood comments repellent, but you sure didn’t find them surprising.

 

Platner was the opposite of a known quantity, a nobody whose blue-collar job and military service recalled the archetype of working-class American masculinity as stoic, humble, capable, and decent. When he turned out to be one of the biggest chuds under the sun, the implied warranty about his persona was breached in a way that Trump’s never was. (His initial vetting was “expedited” by his progressive handlers, presumably to get him into the race early before competitors began crowding in.) His party’s establishment could rationalize moving against him on grounds that Democratic voters who supported him had been misled. The GOP establishment never had that luxury with Trump, even after January 6.

 

There are also what we might call logistical differences that explain the president’s success and the oysterman’s failure, and I don’t mean the magnitude of their respective sins. As much as I’d like to believe that a credible rape allegation against Donald Trump in July 2016 would have sunk his candidacy, I do not.

 

One “logistical” difference is the posture of the two parties with respect to electability. By 2016, Republicans had seen center-right establishmentarians John McCain and Mitt Romney trounced by Barack Obama, leaving them open to the idea of nominating a loose cannon. That’s less true of Democrats in 2026, whose only presidential victory since Obama came from an establishment dinosaur who ended up getting the most votes of any candidate in American history.

 

“We have nothing to lose by nominating Platner” just isn’t as persuasive to the left as “we have nothing to lose by nominating Trump” was to the right, especially against a formidable centrist Republican like Susan Collins.

 

Another logistical difference is the two candidates’ dependence on campaign cash. Not only could Trump afford to kick in $66 million to his own effort in 2016, he infamously received billions of dollars in earned media from a press corps that couldn’t get enough of his circus act. Hillary Clinton could (and did) outspend him, but she couldn’t drown him out. Compare that with Platner, who has no such freak-show appeal and who ended up with “just $1.3 million in the bank when he exited the race,” less than $100,000 of which was available to spend, per the New York Times.

 

When the DSCC threatened to turn off the tap if he stayed in, he risked losing his financial lifeline. And grassroots donors were unlikely to (fully) pick up the slack when headlines about a rape he allegedly committed are in every newspaper in America.

 

There’s a third logistical difference between Platner and Trump. The modern Democratic coalition is more diverse than its Republican counterpart was in 2016.

 

When conservative white Christians decided that Trump was fine—good, even!—during his first campaign, they had little reason to fear serious pushback from the top. For all intents and purposes, the entire Republican base had spoken. Pro-Platner progressives aren’t the entire Democratic base. They’re one of several factions, like women and African Americans, on which the party heavily relies.

 

A true blue socialist might be willing to rationalize a minor thing like rape in the name of keeping Platnermania going, but how likely were most left-leaning women in Maine to do so? If Platner couldn’t hold the Democratic coalition together, he was going to lose. And it’s hard, even for progressives, to fault party leaders for intervening to avert a likely defeat.

 

Especially given the stakes of this election.

 

The Flight 93 difference.

 

Without a doubt, how Democrats have handled Platner this week is informed by how Republicans have handled Trump.

 

The right has grown so morally depraved in making excuses for the president, and is so deeply despised for it by their opponents, that the rape allegation against Platner became a de facto test of the left’s alleged moral superiority. How far were they willing to go to justify support for a charismatic populist scumbag of their own?

 

Pretty far, it turns out! They spent the first half of the year hemming and hawing over their candidate’s obvious unfitness for office, and almost certainly would have gone on doing so if the rape claim had come a week after Maine’s deadline for Platner to drop out of the race rather than a week before.

 

As it is, it would have been a cataclysmic moral failure to stick with him. How could the party of #MeToo, of women’s rights and feminism, go on sitting in moral judgment of Donald Trump and Republicans if it refused to move against an accused rapist—especially when dumping him would almost certainly improve its chances of winning?

 

Democrats ended up clearing that very low bar. They can reassure themselves today that they’re still somewhat less sociopathic than the right. Give them a cookie.

 

There’s a second way in which Trump and Trumpism influenced their approach to Platner, I suspect. After 10 years, they’ve maneuvered—or been maneuvered—into becoming the bulwark of “norms” in American politics.

 

The postliberal core of Trumpism is the belief that ruthlessness is a political virtue. You shouldn’t want your child to be a selfish cutthroat willing to flout laws and social conventions to get his way, but you should want your representatives in Washington to be that. Politics is an endless fight for power; to win, you need “fighters” who are willing to get dirty.

 

That’s postliberalism, and that’s Graham Platner. If his accuser is to be believed, he’s willing to flout laws and social conventions to get his way even in his relationships with women. He’s just the sort of bold, transgressive figure Democrats need in the Senate if they’re going to muster the will to do something as cutthroat as packing the Supreme Court, no?

 

No. The left is getting there, but it hasn’t quite yet reached the stage of postliberal degeneracy where on-the-record allegations of sexual assault committed by a populist hero are handwaved away because they’re inconvenient to the cause. The “party of norms” remains a bit more reluctant than its opponents to reduce American politics to a death match between malignantly narcissistic psychos. Another cookie.

 

There’s one more echo of Trumpism in l’affaire Platner. As in 2016, this is a “Flight 93 election” for the out-party.

 

I wrote about that last month when things started to go south for Democrats in Maine. The right-wing case for Trump during his first campaign was that, supposedly, America as we know it wouldn’t survive if Hillary Clinton prevailed. To thwart this existential threat, patriotic Republicans leery of supporting an unstable con artist for president would need to hold their noses and turn out for one on Election Day.

 

It worked. (Twice.) The ironic reward for those patriotic Republicans is an America that has not survived as they, and we, knew it.

 

In 2026 the tables have turned on which party is threatening to finish off what’s left of the American experiment. Had Platner’s rape scandal emerged after the withdrawal deadline had passed, there’s no doubt Democrats in Maine would have borrowed the “Flight 93” playbook and rationalized a vote for him in November as a lesser-evil vote against right-wing autocracy.

 

But because the scandal came before the deadline, they’ve effectively grabbed that playbook anyway and simply modified the strategy. Instead of “storming the cockpit” against Trumpist fascism by rallying behind Platner, they’re doing it by rallying against him. They’re dumping a man with whom many progressives had fallen in love with a clear conscience because replacing him in hopes of winning Maine is simply what protecting America requires.

 

Knifing Graham Platner was the patriotic thing to do.

 

And unlike in 2016, in this case the “Flight 93” rationale has the virtue of being true. It was transparent nonsense when offered on Trump’s behalf, not only because putting a mobster in charge of the executive branch plainly wasn’t in America’s interest but because the electoral logic that drove it was inane. If a Hillary Clinton victory was truly an apocalyptic scenario for the country, postliberals should have reluctantly rallied behind the most electable Republican in the race rather than asking conservatives to reluctantly rally behind a long shot like Trump.

 

Remember, the president trailed in nearly every poll taken that year. The Clinton camp wanted to face him in the general election. If not for a last-minute surprise courtesy of FBI Director James Comey, Democrats probably would have won. The “Flight 93” argument for Trump’s candidacy was self-serving garbage pushed by nationalists who were willing to increase the odds of an America-destroying left-wing victory for the sake of having a Republican nominee who shared their chud politics.

 

The “Flight 93” argument this year is honest and straightforward. America has been badly damaged in every way—civically, economically, internationally—by 18 months of Trump’s unrestrained postliberal rampage through the federal government. To limit the damage to come over his final two years in office, Democrats need to play their strongest hand in competitive congressional races. No excuses, no misgivings. Whatever sentimental attachment a faction might have to a certain candidate, the moment it’s clear that he’s dragging the party down, he should be done.

 

Progressives should have understood that months ago about Platner, but I suspect most of them understand it now. Better late than never. Barely.