The Nazi Tattoo Guy Is Exactly Who You Thought He Was

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, July 07, 2026

 

On the menu today: It’s odd and disturbing. Jenny Racicot’s description in Politico Monday of Graham Platner’s treatment of her — including rape — is not wildly different from Lyndsey Fifield’s description to the New York Times about a month ago of Platner’s treatment of her. Fifield described a violent, angry, erratic man who sought to control her but couldn’t control himself; after that report, almost every Democrat offered a mealy mouthed statement that all allegations must be taken seriously but that they believed Platner’s denial.

 

But Racicot’s allegations were treated dramatically differently than Fifield’s. Within hours, the Maine Democratic Party, Representative Ro Khanna, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Senate Majority PAC, and Senator Elizabeth Warren withdrew their past endorsements. (Warren had called Platner, “My kind of man.”) Even socialist activist Hasan Piker said “that is curtains” for his campaign. I notice Piker said yesterday, “The Nazi tattoo was a red flag for me.”

 

As of this writing, Platner remains in the race, saying via a video statement that he is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.” He also insists that all of Racicot’s accusations are “categorically false.” (Notice the blanket, unspecific denials, in contrast to her detailed description of the assault.)

 

Graham Platner is an awful human being, and that fact was about as hidden as a supernova from the start. Read on.

 

As Will Smith says in I Robot, “You know, somehow, ‘I told you so,’ just doesn’t quite say it.”

 

I’ve written about Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner quite a bit this year. Some might argue I’ve written about him too much, but there was something bizarre about his candidacy, right from the start — a little-known harbormaster in Sullivan, Maine, population 1,246, instantaneously touted by national media like the New York Times as a serious challenger to the sitting chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Even before all the scandals, Platner was greeted by the rest of the media with an astonishing degree of credulity and acclaim. Why did The New Yorker publish a 3,400-word profile of Platner — emphasizing how he “devoured  books on military history” — one month after his campaign announcement? Why did the culinary magazine Bon Appetit do a glowing profile of him last October, talking about his oysters? (At least he didn’t tell the magazine how much he loved ovens.)

 

And then on October 20, we learned about the Nazi tattoo, when Platner discussed it on the Pod Save America podcast and said, in what I am sure he thought was a reassuring tone, “I am not a secret Nazi.”

 

If you have the time, go back and watch how Platner discusses the tattoo on that podcast, about 20 minutes in. He seems incredulous that he’s getting grief about his tattoo, or that anyone could have suspicions about him because of it. “I went to I went to college, I went to the gym, I did all the things. And at no point in this entire experience of my life did anybody ever once say, ‘Hey, you’re a Nazi.’” Platner exhibits no sense of embarrassment, shame, or mortification over getting the tattoo. It’s just a bad thing that happened, but nothing out of the ordinary — like stubbing your toe.

 

To hear Platner tell it, he just has the world’s most astonishing bad luck. Completely at random, he picked a skull-and-crossbones tattoo that just happened to be the same symbol used by the Nazi SS, and then he chose to put that symbol over his heart. And then, for 18 years, the military history buff never recognized that symbol.

 

And then, many years later, when he was on the teen-heavy hookup social media platform Kik, he held his phone in just the right spot to cover up that tattoo that he insisted he had no idea was a Nazi symbol.

 

In Platner’s version of events, he only found out that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol after hearing that opposition researchers were looking into it, at some unspecified date before the October 20 Pod Save America podcast. And then, two days later, he announced he had gotten another tattoo to cover it up. He insists Lyndsey Fifield is lying when she says that years earlier, he had called it “my Totenkopf.” He insists his former political director was lying when she said he had told her he had a “problematic” tattoo in the summer of last year.

 

Here’s the part that stuck with me: If you had found that you had accidentally gotten a tattoo of the Nazi regime over your heart, how many traffic laws would you break getting to a place to get it removed? Or would you just grab a steak knife and try to cut it off immediately?

 

A man who doesn’t think getting a symbol of the SS concentration camp guards tattooed over his heart is that big of a deal, and just a routine snafu . . . is not as opposed to Naziism as he wants everyone to think.

 

Every couple of weeks, we would find out that some other part of Platner’s carefully crafted initial image was poppycock. His whole campaign was built on his working-class image, but he attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut. The only customer of his oyster business was his mother’s restaurant. He bought his house with a $200,000 loan from his father, not with “support from the VA” as he had claimed. On the campaign trail, Platner kept insisting that Susan Collins had sent him to Iraq, but she voted to authorize military force in 2002 and he enlisted in 2004 and volunteered for three tours over eight years.

 

And then the post-tattoo scandals piled up. He blamed his choice of tattoo on the culture of the U.S. military. His Reddit comments about rape victims and black people would have gotten any other figure instantly canceled a few years ago. He called himself a communist, in the long-ago era of . . . 2021.

 

He’d been sexting with lots of women on Kik, but he insisted none of them were underage. Fifield described how Platner “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.”

 

After each disturbing revelation, other Democrats and media interviewers would ask Platner if there were any other skeletons in his closet, any other unpleasant chapters from his past the public ought to know about. Every time, Platner said he had no other dark secrets.

 

Democrats lined up to endorse him.

 

Anybody with eyes could see that this guy, at minimum, had been a world-class creep. The explanation from him, his wife, and his campaign was that he was a changed man.

 

Was he? How were any of us supposed to know? And even if he was a changed man . . . what made this very recently reformed reprobate the kind of guy you’d want to have as a U.S. senator? In his early appearances, it was clear he didn’t know how the Senate appropriations process works.

 

We’ve seen Democrats circle the wagons around scandal-plagued figures before. But usually, those figures had done a thing or two to inspire or “earn” that reflexive loyalty and shameless excuse-making.

 

Platner’s growing list of unsavory accusations kept getting longer, and . . . he had just shown up a few months ago. He was just some guy who had just arrived on the scene. He had never run anything; his harbormaster job was, in his own words, a “very, very part-time job.” (The town actually left the position vacant from February 2022 to April 2023.) He hadn’t helped get any bills passed, he hadn’t led the fight for any particular cause. He was just some guy who ranted about how “Senator Collins is bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu,” claimed John Fetterman was a “stooge for AIPAC,” and who accused Israel of committing genocide. Platner didn’t have a lot to say on foreign policy, but he sure made clear that he believed that Israel was evil and controlled Washington. Something of an odd strategy if you want to dispel suspicions that you ever had any youthful dalliances with neo-Naziism.

 

The term “gaslighting” gets thrown around way too frequently in our political culture; sometimes it’s effectively used as a synonym for lying.  But this . . . this felt like an unprecedented, large-scale gaslighting effort. A lot of the mainstream media coverage of Platner felt like a weird, coordinated effort to convince the people of Maine that the scuzziest guy the Democratic Party could find was as solid and reliable as the Brawny Paper Towel Man.

 

Jon Favreau, one of the Pod Save America hosts, told his followers at the end of April, “Graham Platner isn’t just our best and only chance to beat Susan Collins, he’s a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown and is always trying to do better. I hope everyone with reservations takes a little time to get to know the real-life version of him, not what the algorithm throws in our faces.” I refer you to My Cousin Vinny.

 

On Monday night, Favreau was singing a dramatically different tune. “Platner needs to drop out ASAP — these are awful, credible allegations. Said on the pod after the (also credible) June NYT story that his biggest problem going forward would be credibility. It’s now abundantly clear that he just hasn’t been honest about his past and can’t be trusted as a candidate for office.”

 

Why did people trust Platner, Favreau? Because you told them he was a good and decent man!

 

This morning, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg concedes she was completely fooled by the hype around Platner:

 

Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.

 

I do not say this lightly: If Platner fooled you, maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics. Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con artists, crooks, and cads of every kind, and it always will be. If the media has any useful role to play in our system, it is to look beyond the spin and the campaign-crafted image and to tell the world who these candidates really are, warts and all, so the electorate can make an informed choice.

 

F. A. Hayek figured this out decades ago, and Lord Acton long before him. Power does not just attract “good” people. Lots of bad people want to be elected to high office, because they want all the things that come with power.

 

To believe Platner, you have to believe that he accidentally got a Nazi tattoo, and didn’t notice for 18 years, and his political director made up a story about him warning her of a controversial tattoo, and no one he sexted on Kik was underage, and his exes are making up the worst possible accusations about him. You must believe that Platner, who’s already been caught in several lies about his past, is telling the truth, and that a whole bunch of people who knew him well for many years are telling vicious lies about him, at great risk to their reputations.

 

Under Maine’s ballot vacancy laws, Platner has until July 13 to drop out. The state party would then have until July 27 — a further two weeks — to select a new candidate.

 

But don’t let the stain of selecting Platner wash off the 72 percent of Maine Democrats — almost 120,000 people — who voted for this guy in the primary.