This is a little off base to me. The Nazi tattoo isn’t bad because of any thing about what Platner says about Israel. The Nazi tattoo is bad because the Nazis themselves are very bad! Res ipsa loquitor! My POLICY views are similar to Platner’s on a lot of issues, but come on. The man got a Nazi tattoo and bragged about it for over a decade! He doesn’t belong in the US Senate.
The Democrats just look like hypocrites. That's the problem. Either character matters or it doesn't. There's no middle ground.
Dems have spent the past ten years talking about how we should demand better of our elected officials, only to accept clear character flaws when it's one of their own. THIS is why normal people hate politics. You just cannot trust people to maintain a clear standard.
You want Platner, then fine. But know that "we need to control the Senate to stop Trump" is the *exact* same logic Republicans used when they argued for Trump.
"Either character matters or it doesn't. There's no middle ground."
Nonsense, there's tons of nuance here. For example, Trump is literally the President of the United States and commander-in-chief, while Platner would be just one of 100 senators. That's a crucial difference in terms of how much character matters.
They did, and I don't stand by Platner. Fortunately I'm not in Maine so it doesn't matter.
But the GOP stood for control of the Senate to prevent a Great Replacement run by a combo of brown people and Jews from driving white people and their delectable pets into extinction and forcing children to transition without telling their parents. If they didn't win the Senate, the Managerial Class would nonspecifically destroy everything good about America.
I could concretely list what Collins has done to enable Trump and explain the good that would be done if her and just a handful of people didn't enable him from the Senate. This scenario is sane, ongoing, and stoppable.
The form matters. I don't like "Our side at all cost." Heck, she voted to impeach? Someone convince her to vote against him now. But it is not the same scenario. It must matter eventually if the form is driven by reason or madness, even if those of us inside are poor judges if which is which.
More specifically, many liberals have spent the last ten years being VERY loose in their deployment of Nazi comparisons. To the point of really trivializing the Nazis. Now we have a candidate who sported a bona fide Nazi tattoo for *decades* and they don’t give a shit. I find the whole thing sickening.
The argument the Nazi tattoo is about Israel is so fucking absurd. Israel completely blinds people to normal reactions and the "Nazi tattoo is actual about Israel" talk is beyond borderline anti semitism. Ridiculous. One of MYs worst opinions. Planter hasn't even pretended to offer a reason why he has it. What about the nazis did he admire so much to get the tattoo and brag about it?
People who think Platner is an “edge lord” clearly have never spent time with blue collar men. “Haha yea I was drunk in the Marines and I got this tattoo and it turns out it’s some Nazi shit isn’t that fucking wild bro? Here have another shot!”
I’ve met guys like that and don’t disagree. But that’s a specific type of blue collar guy, not blue collar men in general. Plenty of blue collar men are types I’d be happy to have representing me. But the Platner type you describe is not someone I want in the US Senate!
Let’s leave aside Platner was born to wealth and attended an elite prep school, so his blue collar background isn’t that solid. And the fact of the matter is that an extremely small number of blue collar men who join the military get SS tattoos and then keep them for two decades. Platner is an atypical example.
I can’t read the man’s mind or heart, but it shows - at a minimum - a lack of judgment, and that is buttressed by many of the other issues he’s had, some of which are understandable and others less so.
I think people ought be honest with themselves about how they would view Platner if he was not a Democrat with (currently) decent polling with no alternative. If there was a Democratic alternative, I feel pretty confident that most of his supporters here would happily give him the Al Franken treatment.
That's not an explanation. If you were drunk for days on end would it cross your mind to get a Nazi tattoo? Having done so would you keep it for nearly 20y?
Id even be somewhat okay if he were a generic war history guy saying “I like how disciplined the SS were” or something. But its literally a tattoo popularized by use of nazis who worked in concentration camps. You have to give SOMEthing other than “yeah when I'm drunk I love concentration camp guards” !??? This is all so ridiculous.
I think you have probably not spent that much time around the kind of guy who was in the Marines and then became an oyster farmer. No, obviously he didn’t intentionally get a Nazi tattoo and also no I’m not saying this reflects well on him — it doesn’t! Personally I think he’s pretty dumb and honestly I’m not even sure I’d vote for him over Collins if I lived in Maine. But the idea that he’s a Nazi or an “edge lord” or whatever is the most out of touch shit I’ve heard.
I was enlisted in the military for 23 years and saw a lot of dumb Marines and others from various branches do dumb shit. That’s all forgivable IMO, including the tattoo.
The problem isn’t that he did something dumb on leave long ago, it’s that he kept the mistake for two decades, lied about it, and only got rid of it a few months ago when it became a political problem.
Getting the tattoo (and keeping it) makes him seem dumb and reckless. I do not think he’s a Nazi. But I do think he’s dumb, reckless, and opinionated in a bombastic way. Doesn’t seem to have good character. Probably entertaining enough to hang out with. But not someone who has any business in the US senate (I would say this even if I generally agreed with him factionally). And even if he was drunk when he got the tattoo, he wasn’t (I hope) drunk for the entire 20 years he kept it.
I have done about $80M+ worth of contract work with the Marines. You think he accidentally got a highly specific nazi tattoo? That's even more absurd than pretending he's just an edge lord and won't admit it.
No, don't you see, Quinn. There's nothing to be learned about someone based on what they do when they are drunk. We can't hold anyone accountable for their actions if they've had a couple of beers too many? I still don't understand why drunk driving is a crime -- I mean, he was drunk so whatta ya gonna do? "I only slept with that woman because I was drunk" isn't going to work at home, and I don't know why Eric thinks it works here.
So you will vote against anyone, no matter what, if they got drunk and did something stupid? (I mean, stupid, not criminal or horrific, like killing some poor kid while driving.)
I'm only responding to the thread, not making a meta-argument. And Eric is trying desperately to explain away the tattoo with "well, he was probably drunk", which I find to be ... less than convincing, and even less convincing as to the idea that it doesn't say *anything* about Platner.
Getting drunk and doing something stupid is not disqualifying. Nor is even what Platner did (assuming it was because he was drunk, even though I don't think that is his argument). But Eric's defense is off base.
I'm in Florida. I don't have a vote in Maine and I'm glad of that fact. The fact that Collins voted to impeach Trump is enough for me to say she is one of the good Republicans, regardless of the rest of her votes. And Platner seems like an asshole. So a tough call.
It's actually worse tbh to get a more specific nazi tattoo than a less specific one imo. Esp as it, again, was popularized by concentration camp guards and the SS. He absolutely knew what he was doing. You think he never thought twice about what it meant ever again? Beyond absurd.
Yes, I think it’s very possible he accidentally got a totenkopf tattoo. And I think if he knew what it meant he wouldn’t have *released a video of him dancing shirtless after starting a campaign*
but what about all the other stuff, about women in particular? It's pretty gross. And there's plenty of other stuff to get turned off by. Plus the sexting story just broke a couple of days ago. Is he sending pics of his private parts around? Is he another Anthony Wiener? He's either debilitatingly stupid, has major mental health issues, is drunk all day every day, or jsut a terrible person. None of those options means he should be governing anyone.
When Platner says he didn’t know it was a Nazi symbol, I believe him, for the simple reason that *I myself* had never heard of this particular symbol even though I paid a lot more attention in history class than other students and am better read than most people.
If it were a swastika it’d be different, because even people who never paid attention in history class, never read, and only know about the Nazis from TV know that the swastika is a Nazi symbol. But the Nazis’ other symbols are obscure and known only to those who’ve studied Nazism in depth, which is only a tiny percentage of the population.
He didn’t know, because normal people don’t know. It’s that simple.
Prior to the news breaking about the tattoo if you'd been shown pictures of one hundred skull and crossbone tatoos could you have pointed to the right one and said, yes, *that's* the totenkopf.
I couldn't have.
Maybe he should have removed it immediately upon learning its origin but people are funny. That leads to the secondary question: does the tattoo he got while drunk provide evidence that he has Nazi sympathies? And if not, man, what are we arguing about?
I'm not aware of him bragging about his Nazi tattoo, at least not in those terms. I find it very believable he wasn't aware of the symbolism, and thought it was just a skull & crossbones.
I'm just sick of the witch hunts. I'm tired of people who act like the most cynical, least charitable interpretation is obviously true & anyone who disagrees is naive or complicit. It's stupid, and people who do it in public should be called stupid, in public, as often as it takes.
Platner's not a Nazi. If he was, he would've recognized the totenkopf & wouldn't have tattooed it on his chest. I am begging everyone to just think about it for five minutes.
Yeah, it's possible to be critical of Netanyahu and also think that the Nazis are beyond the pale because of the Holocaust. Nazi symbolism is just straight old-fashioned anti-Semitism. This shouldn't be hard.
Everyone has such perfect knowledge they didn't have before the answer was handed them on a silver platter. I don't know about you, but prior to the news, I couldn't have picked the totenkopf out of a bunch of skull and crossbones for the life of me.
So, I agree, this shouldn't be hard. For very different reasons than you say, though.
I'm glad you're in this thread challenging people on this. I don't think I would like Platner, but the "Nazi tattoo" argument is driving me crazy. The totenkopf is not a recognizable symbol. It's a skull. There's a lot of douchebags out there with skull tattoos.
It was literally the symbol from the "Are we the baddies?" sketch from over a decade ago. He also had years before he ran for office to have it removed. Combine that with all of his weird edgelord behavior, this is a pattern of behavior of being an absolute moron and having no personal standards.
Nice reference. I'll repeat my question: prior to the news could *you* have accurately identified it as the Nazi tattoo? Maybe you could have (good for you); I couldn't have, and I suspect your average person couldn't have either.
In the meantime, if he's so obviously bad, why do so many people in Maine seem to like him?
Yes, I would have known what that was. According to people in his inner circle, he also knew what it was for years and referred to it as a totenkopf before he even ran for office.
Any decent person, having learned they’d accidentally gotten a Nazi tattoo, would get it covered at the first opportunity. He waited years, and didn’t cover it until he started running for Senate. In addition to retweeting antisemites and going on antisemitic podcasts. I don’t know whether he’s a Nazi, but he’s nowhere near as averse to Nazis as he should be.
Gotta push back on the idea that people only care about the tattoo to the extent it reflects opinions about Israel. My wife brought up Platner last night and was legit angry at the idea that someone with a Totenkopf tattoo was running for Senate. She didn't mention Israel once in the conversation, and anyway isn't "pro-Israel" in a factional sense. She just thought it reflected very poor judgment and temperament.
The Nazis targeted and killed lots of people, not just the Jews. Gypsys, gay & lesbians, the disabled, mixed-race people. Not everything is about Israel, Gaza and the Jews.
The guy has a Nazi tattoo, is incredibly critical of Israel, and is a stated fan on an antisemitic podcast. How much grace are we supposed to give him? If we heard that Susan Collins had once had dinner with Nick Fuentes, it’d be used as proof of her secret Nazi inclinations. But somehow the guy with a literal Nazi tattoo deserves our discernment?
Nobody can seriously believe Platner is pro-Nazi though, right? Like, he absolutely does seem like the kind of guy who would drunkenly get a tattoo, later find out it’s a Nazi tattoo, find that funny and brag (probably drunkenly) about how ridiculous it is, and also not get it removed because he just doesn’t care that much. Sure, that kind of guy is also not who I want in the senate. But he’s not a Nazi.
He walked around with that thing on his chest for twenty years - well after he was aware of the symbolism - and only covered it when it became a political liability. If I was a big enough idiot to accidentally get a racist tattoo, I’d be mortified and RUN to get it removed as soon as I found out.
"Pro-Nazi" seems like a very high bar to clear when (last I checked, sigh) everybody basically agreed that Nazis were the bad guys.
It's a lower bar to clear to say that Platner is an enormous dipshit who is not qualified to sit in the Senate, and for me (ymmv) we don't need to clear the higher bar. It's just not very interesting.
Unironically I wonder if the gap in how perceive this could be based on how seriously you take tattoos are in the first place.
I am not a tattoo guy, and everytime I have had the idle thought of getting a tattoo it was something that at the time I cared about deeply and wanted a tattoo to represent that. (I actually remember when I was a teenager, my mom asked me what I thought about tattoos, and she told me that in college in the 80s she considered getting a Woody Allen tattoo and in retrospect, is glad she didn't; that scared me away from tattoos way more than any "you'll never get hired" scolding did, so if that was her aim, great parenting on her part.)
But some people get a *lot* of tattoos. Maybe their bad tattoos are closer to my bad tweets. A lot of people who I saw become more skeptical after the tattoo had been willing to shrug off the Reddit posts that were unveiled a few days before. I think voters on the ground thought of the two as closer together (and also did not think highly of the people trying to make these a campaign issue, which could also be what leads people to shrug off this round of scandals too).
A committed national socialist ideologue? Nah. But the man sported an SS tattoo for two decades, has a history of racist tweets, and is hostile to the only Jewish state. If you told me those three facts about any random person, I’d presume they hate Jews.
Did Elon Musk give a Nazi salute? In that moment, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But all the other things he did cries out that he has fascistic tendencies so maybe the salute he gave was probative.
Platner gets a tattoo possibly for innocent (albeit boneheaded) reasons and maybe not. But, like with Elon, don't you need at least some other evidence that he has Nazi sympathies? And is there such evidence? Folks, the answer is "no." The tattoo is a synecdoche for . . . nothing.
You are of course free to feel strongly what you feel, but if we give up controls of our government to Trump/MAGA this easily then we'll get what we deserve.
I don't care if Platner is or isn't a Nazi. I think that it's bad for the Democratic Party's national brand to throw their support behind someone with a Nazi tattoo, and that it would be pressing to win a fight while ceding strength in the larger war.
Right, and I think, tactically, it will hurt us in ALL the races for the midterms to have the reputation as the hypocritical party that backed a guy with a Nazi tattoo. We don't just need to win in Maine, we need to win a lot of races in November across the country, where there are a lot of swing voters susceptible to the message that both sides are bad so they may as well not vote or go for Republicans.
It's not about my morals. It's about how I think this makes us look nationally.
Standard response from Candidate X in State Y when asked, "I'm not interested in what's happening in Maine; that's an issue for the voters in Maine. I care about the voters in State Y and how they're suffering under Trump's corrupt and failed policies yadda yadda yadda."
We in the chattering classes are all wrapped up in this but I guarantee that 99% of the voters outside of Maine will never give a damn if they know about it at all.
The hypocrisy of progressive Democrats (Sirota etc.) just drives me nuts. Imagine a Republican candidate for federal office with a Nazi tattoo, a Reddit history of racist & genuinely sexist comments (blaming women for being raped, etc.), a DUI (this is surprisingly underreported), and now apparently sexting with 6-12 women (the number is from the Platner campaign this morning!) People would be foaming at the mouth if he had generic rightwing views.
I don't think Platner's secretly a Nazi, but I think he is probably a knucklehead. If you don't think that's a real issue, I'd just point you in the direction of Fetterman- supposedly progressive Blue Collar Coded Dude who has some genuinely bad votes now that he's in office, and appears to have genuine mental health struggles.
Not to uh reveal what state I live in, but I'm just going to write in Margaret Chase Smith and call it a day
Edit: I read Lisa C's comment's and I strongly agree with it. Even if Platner wins this particular seat, the damage to the Democratic brand nationally is pretty bad. 'Your party has the Senator with a Nazi tattoo and a bunch of racist & sex scandals' is just a terrible look. People saying 'well he's better than Collins' have the strategic mind of a goldfish
This would be more salient if the national Democratic brand wasn't already trash, even among their own voters. And it isn't trash because of upstarts like Platner, but because of the milquetoast moderates who have been in control of the party for more than a decade now, and in particular their perceived fecklessness as the the only vehicle for opposition to Trump.
Platner is pulling a Trump in that he has recognized and is now riding populist discontent against both his own party and Republican governance to political success. It may be hypocritical to only support it when it's your guy (or at least not the other guy) but that's more a result of the incentives of primaries, FPTP, and the various other ways our winner-take-all system distort our politics.
I don't fully buy MY's take that Mills was a fake-good candidate because she was old and not very popular as governor. Mamdani and Platner have learned from Trump that running against your own party in their own primary can be very successful when your own party is quite unpopular and ineffective. MY's take is based on the reasoning that you need to convince moderates to vote for you to win; Mamdani, Trump, and maybe now Platner's strategy is motivating people who are unlikely to vote to come out for you, specifically, because of this vague anti-establishment sentiment, along with some people from the opposite side who are also motivated by that sentiment (like the Trump to Mamdani voters we have seen reported on). It's irrational, but that seems like it just is the vibe in US politics now and likely going forward.
The Democratic brand is already a millstone around the neck of every candidate running in a state to the right of Pennsylvania. Your grand strategy is to turn around the Democratic Party's national brand by all but guaranteeing another two years of Trump judges to give Republican election-tampering and criminality a pass? I know you have a thing about whataboutism, but why do you think Pennsylvania voters are going to care about some guy in Maine when Mike Lee is out here publicly cheering when Democrats get attacked and killed? I honestly don't think anybody outside of Maine and a handful of very online individuals such as ourselves are paying attention.
I don't like Graham Platner's views on Israel, it's true, but I don't think he's a Nazi, and I haven't seen anyone claiming that he is. But the Nazi tattoo - and his subsequent disingenuousness over it - shows something: that's he's an edgelord who found it funny to play around with Nazi symbols until they became an embarrassment to him.
And - to turn the argument around - I don't think that progressives would accept that from a figure whose politics they disapproved of, whereas I can't frankly imagine moderates accepting it from a figure whose politics they approved of. I do think it is the progressives who are behaving hypocritically in this - another example of Gaza as the Omnicause which trumps everything else.
People who think Platner is an “edge lord” clearly have never spent time with blue collar men. “Haha yea I was drunk in the Marines and I got this tattoo and it turns out it’s some Nazi shit isn’t that fucking wild bro? Here have another shot!”
Why should someone with such poor judgment be a senator? If I got drunk and woke up with a Nazi tattoo, my first order of business would be removing it, not bragging about it.
That's what I said in the first place! He's definitely not a Nazi. But I called him an "edgelord" - which is far from being an actual Nazi - and you disagreed. But your account of him here makes him sound exactly like an edgelord - in other words, a person who says or does outrageous things, not because he believes in them, but because he likes the shock it causes. Because if he wasn't, he would have had the tattoo removed immediately, not spent time joking and laughing about it.
Now it's true that - as you correctly intuited! - I haven't spent much time socializing with blue-collar men. (Not that Platner is actually blue-collar by background, but that's another matter.) But to me, you simply make it sound that blue-collar male culture is a culture that is very open to edgelord behavior, and that is a problem when someone from that culture wants to appeal to the broader electorate, to many of whom that behavior is disqualifying. And again, I don't think progressives would accept that excuse from anyone but another progressive.
Plenty of prep school kids go into the military. It doesn't mean they didn't come from money. There's a particular type of rich kid who adopts the aesthetic of a stereotype of the working class because it lets them be an edgelord. It's not that far off from guys who get white Rasta dreads or wear berets in college.
In my experience its the opposite - at any criticism of the tattoo the pro platner people leap to: "so you think he's a Nazi? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? Go listen to his John Stewart podcast!"
I'd be interested to find someone who actually says this - not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen them. I literally haven't seen a single person claiming that the tattoo means that he's a Nazi - but maybe I've been looking in the wrong places ...
The politics are relevant to how you judge the tattoo. If someone with Nazi-adjacent politics had this tattoo, you’d have more questions about whether they were an actual Nazi. I think this blog made the analogy earlier—like when you see Jordan Peterson having communist propaganda posters decorating his house no one thinks he’s a secret communist, but if you had Hasan Piker with those same decorations you would wonder about it.
Susan Collins voted for the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump in 2021. I figure there is a non-zero chance (maybe 10%, 20%?) Trump endorses Platner.
The "my opponent was mean to you, dear leader" lane is very, very wide and runs straight into the White House (with an exit for the Justice Department). The more I think about it, I wouldn't bet against it at even a 30% chance he endorses Platner.
Did she vote for John thune? Did she confirm most of Trump’s cabinet picks? She’s voted with republicans 90% since 2024 in a light blue state. She’s going to lose. Her age is another factor.
Cornyn was a much more reliable Trump supporter and that didn't save him (albeit in the primary). I'd gladly take the other side of your "0% chance" bet.
Trump as stupid as he is is not that stupid. He knows Collins is the most important Senator in the whole body for him: A Republican from a blue state who will always be there for him when she's most needed. The contrast with Cassidy couldn't be clearer: vote for Trump's conviction and find yourself tossed aside for another MAGA person in a deep red state.
Surprisingly, this is one area where I have a lower opinion of Trump than you appear to have. I don't think Trump cares AT ALL about the Republican Party except to the extent he can wear it as a skin suit over his personal pursuits. I don't think he sees Collins any differently than Cassidy, Cornyn, Mamdani or Platner. They are all just enemies to him, some near and some far.
I can't get behind Platner because I think in the long run, Democrats lose too much moral high ground in exchange for a shot at a Senate seat. It just fortifies the opinions of the "both sides are bad" swing voters to support a guy with a Nazi tattoo. It makes us look like hypocrites, which is a smear Republicans already love to throw at us and which does find an audience among swing voters. I think ultimately Democrats throwing their weight behind Platner will weaken us on a national level.
Fetterman should be a warning to Dems about getting behind someone too weird. Best case scenario, Platner wins and he votes like Angus King and doesn't rock the boat. More likely he's going to break with the caucus at inopportune moments and cause headaches for six years (or just loses outright to Collins, which should cause Chuck Schumer to resign his leadership role).
Since everyone is discussing the tattoo I’ll offer my 2c. I believe Platner’s claim that he got it because he picked something that looked cool off the tattoo parlor wall when he was in his 20s without knowing the history of it. I don’t believe that he only found out it was a Nazi symbol last year. Should’ve gotten it covered up earlier; fact that he didn’t shows poor judgement.
Platner is a boob. No one knows what he'd be like in the Senate. At least Susan Collins will revert to normal once the midterms are over and Trump is clearly a lameduck president. We need moderates of her caliber in the Senate, no matter what party she belongs to.
I'm assuming that there will be a reset in the GOP -- at least in the Senate -- after the midterms. Trump is already faltering. Let's see. The only thing to recommend Platner is pure Democratic parrtisanship. I mean, don't you agree that he's a clown? We already have too many clowns in the Senate.
Yes, of course he's a clown. There are already several or dozens of extremely high-impact freakish clowns (I'm staring at RFKjr, but there are many others) in the executive branch and Collins will vote to confirm more. I wish I thought better of her, but I don't.
So what you're saying is that a wild-card Democratic clown is better than a serious, moderate Republican. We really need to start thinking beyond Trump but many Democrats can think of nothing else. Anyway, nice chatting.
There's not going to be a reset. As long as Trump has the ability to end Senator's careers by endorsing primary opponents they'll bend the knee. While Trump is faltering among the electorate at large, a majority of GOP primary voters still have an almost cultish devotion to him.
Trump has already lost a midterm and a general election and this didn’t happen. I could maybe believe this in 2018 but it seems like wishful thinking now.
See the link for some biographic information on Collins. She's not right on everything -- not by a long shot -- but I've never heard anyone question her seriousness, ethics, or intelligence. Normally I'd vote for a Democrat -- but Platner really does seem like a boob.
I promise I have no problem with Platner’s criticism of Israel but I do have a problem with his Nazi tattoo. I simply don’t believe he didn’t know what it was. Do I believe he’s a “devotee of National Socialism”? No. I believe he is an arrogant, immature, aggressive edgelord with serious impulsivity problems. The texting - and being on Kik of all places! - is yet more evidence. The Reddit comments are more evidence still. I don’t know what I’d do if I lived in Maine. I do have relatives who live in Maine. They’re all old ladies (that’s who lives in Maine!) and reliable democrats. And they’re appalled and also struggling with the decision. Susan Collins is terrible for the country, but she’s been pretty good for Maine. That’s the dilemma.
This was a case of bad recruitment by establishment Dems as mentioned. Mills was the easy button but never made sense for the reasons stated. People complain all the time about Schumer for ideological reasons but I think the strongest case for new leadership is he has lost his political touch.
What’s most disqualifying about Platner is the very fact that he wants to be a Senator. The combination of Platner’s delusion and the cowardice of other Maine Democrats who chose not to run creates a toxic brew and gives Collins an opening she shouldn’t have had. I’m glad not to be a Mainer faced with this awful choice.
Edit: This was meant as a main-thread comment. But since it didn’t land there I’ll respond thusly to MikeV: We should at least give credit to Schumer for recognizing that Platner was a uniquely bad candidate, even if he didn’t respond appropriately by press-ganging Mills as a lousy opponent.
It’s a lot to ask a moderate to swallow both ideological and personalistic flaws though. Mamdani always seemed like an inexperienced, a little naive but a hardworking, competent and high IQ person who could learn on the job. Platner seems like a genuinely stupid person. If I was in Maine, I would still vote for him to prevent MAGAficiation of the judiciary though
My stance is that I can't stand Platner as a person but I'd vote for him over Collins because Senate control is on the line. That said, I'm extremely annoyed by everybody who is declaring that it's prudish pearl-clutching to think he's a generalized scumbag as well as a horrible husband for repeatedly cheating on his wife right after they got married when they were trying to have a child, even going to Norway for IVF, and she had a miscarriage.
Obviously, candidates with sordid and messy personal lives end up winning elections, but they tend to underperform their partisan baseline. Roy Moore and Herschel Walker lost races they should have won, and Trump won 2/3 elections but he lost the popular vote once, and he only won it by 1.5% the other time against a very flawed Democratic Party with high inflation and a massive influx at the border. Like, Ken Paxton is almost certainly going to underperform Greg Abbott and Republicans nationwide!
That said, most people aren't consistent about political morality, and are disinclined to admit what I did at the beginning of this comment, that I find Platner terrible but I'd vote for him anyways. They make excuses for their ideological allies and condemn their ideological opponents for the same behavior, like if Platner didn't say the right stuff about Israel, he'd have never gained traction in the first place! Similarly, there are a whole lot of moderate/centrist types who were poised to hate Platner long before the Nazi tattoo was uncovered or the sexting scandal was revealed because they hate his brand of economic populism, and they're definitely not being equinanamous in their condemnations of him.
I just can't believe that this is the best Maine could do.
That said, I think I'd be a better Senator than Graham Platner. Do I want to run for the US Senate from [upper midwest state]? Fuck no, it sounds awful.
Seeing the top comments here, I have to take the other side.
I'm genuinely mystified why people care so much about the tattoo. I have to ask the people who say it's disqualifying- do you not know any military veterans? Any men who work blue collar jobs? I don't like Platner and probably wouldn't vote for him but geez what a complete non-issue!
Calibration- I work in the mining industry. Getting an offensive tattoo because you're on a bender and it looks cool on the wall then keeping it because it's a wild story? I know approximately 1 million dudes who would do that.
This is a little off base to me. The Nazi tattoo isn’t bad because of any thing about what Platner says about Israel. The Nazi tattoo is bad because the Nazis themselves are very bad! Res ipsa loquitor! My POLICY views are similar to Platner’s on a lot of issues, but come on. The man got a Nazi tattoo and bragged about it for over a decade! He doesn’t belong in the US Senate.
Democrats should demand better.
The Democrats just look like hypocrites. That's the problem. Either character matters or it doesn't. There's no middle ground.
Dems have spent the past ten years talking about how we should demand better of our elected officials, only to accept clear character flaws when it's one of their own. THIS is why normal people hate politics. You just cannot trust people to maintain a clear standard.
You want Platner, then fine. But know that "we need to control the Senate to stop Trump" is the *exact* same logic Republicans used when they argued for Trump.
If parties actually had power, we wouldn't get candidates like Platner. The only thing the last 10 years have taught us is normal people are stupid.
Repeal the 17th, anyone?
General election voters are fine. It’s the primary voters that suck.
The elites are stupid, they decided their pick should be someone born in 1947.
Everyone is stupid and the system could be much better designed and structured.
"Either character matters or it doesn't. There's no middle ground."
Nonsense, there's tons of nuance here. For example, Trump is literally the President of the United States and commander-in-chief, while Platner would be just one of 100 senators. That's a crucial difference in terms of how much character matters.
I'd rather be a winning hypocrite than a losing noble person.
They did, and I don't stand by Platner. Fortunately I'm not in Maine so it doesn't matter.
But the GOP stood for control of the Senate to prevent a Great Replacement run by a combo of brown people and Jews from driving white people and their delectable pets into extinction and forcing children to transition without telling their parents. If they didn't win the Senate, the Managerial Class would nonspecifically destroy everything good about America.
I could concretely list what Collins has done to enable Trump and explain the good that would be done if her and just a handful of people didn't enable him from the Senate. This scenario is sane, ongoing, and stoppable.
The form matters. I don't like "Our side at all cost." Heck, she voted to impeach? Someone convince her to vote against him now. But it is not the same scenario. It must matter eventually if the form is driven by reason or madness, even if those of us inside are poor judges if which is which.
More specifically, many liberals have spent the last ten years being VERY loose in their deployment of Nazi comparisons. To the point of really trivializing the Nazis. Now we have a candidate who sported a bona fide Nazi tattoo for *decades* and they don’t give a shit. I find the whole thing sickening.
The argument the Nazi tattoo is about Israel is so fucking absurd. Israel completely blinds people to normal reactions and the "Nazi tattoo is actual about Israel" talk is beyond borderline anti semitism. Ridiculous. One of MYs worst opinions. Planter hasn't even pretended to offer a reason why he has it. What about the nazis did he admire so much to get the tattoo and brag about it?
He said he was drunk and given everything else I believe that and that he’s just kind of dumb in general
If I woke up from a bender and discovered I had a Nazi tattoo, my first order of business would be removing the Nazi tattoo.
My comment from elsewhere:
People who think Platner is an “edge lord” clearly have never spent time with blue collar men. “Haha yea I was drunk in the Marines and I got this tattoo and it turns out it’s some Nazi shit isn’t that fucking wild bro? Here have another shot!”
I’ve met guys like that and don’t disagree. But that’s a specific type of blue collar guy, not blue collar men in general. Plenty of blue collar men are types I’d be happy to have representing me. But the Platner type you describe is not someone I want in the US Senate!
People like this deserve to be nowhere near the authority of running an Applebee's much less in the Senate
Let’s leave aside Platner was born to wealth and attended an elite prep school, so his blue collar background isn’t that solid. And the fact of the matter is that an extremely small number of blue collar men who join the military get SS tattoos and then keep them for two decades. Platner is an atypical example.
I can’t read the man’s mind or heart, but it shows - at a minimum - a lack of judgment, and that is buttressed by many of the other issues he’s had, some of which are understandable and others less so.
I think people ought be honest with themselves about how they would view Platner if he was not a Democrat with (currently) decent polling with no alternative. If there was a Democratic alternative, I feel pretty confident that most of his supporters here would happily give him the Al Franken treatment.
No one like that should be in the Senate.
That's not an explanation. If you were drunk for days on end would it cross your mind to get a Nazi tattoo? Having done so would you keep it for nearly 20y?
Id even be somewhat okay if he were a generic war history guy saying “I like how disciplined the SS were” or something. But its literally a tattoo popularized by use of nazis who worked in concentration camps. You have to give SOMEthing other than “yeah when I'm drunk I love concentration camp guards” !??? This is all so ridiculous.
I think you have probably not spent that much time around the kind of guy who was in the Marines and then became an oyster farmer. No, obviously he didn’t intentionally get a Nazi tattoo and also no I’m not saying this reflects well on him — it doesn’t! Personally I think he’s pretty dumb and honestly I’m not even sure I’d vote for him over Collins if I lived in Maine. But the idea that he’s a Nazi or an “edge lord” or whatever is the most out of touch shit I’ve heard.
I was enlisted in the military for 23 years and saw a lot of dumb Marines and others from various branches do dumb shit. That’s all forgivable IMO, including the tattoo.
The problem isn’t that he did something dumb on leave long ago, it’s that he kept the mistake for two decades, lied about it, and only got rid of it a few months ago when it became a political problem.
Getting the tattoo (and keeping it) makes him seem dumb and reckless. I do not think he’s a Nazi. But I do think he’s dumb, reckless, and opinionated in a bombastic way. Doesn’t seem to have good character. Probably entertaining enough to hang out with. But not someone who has any business in the US senate (I would say this even if I generally agreed with him factionally). And even if he was drunk when he got the tattoo, he wasn’t (I hope) drunk for the entire 20 years he kept it.
I have done about $80M+ worth of contract work with the Marines. You think he accidentally got a highly specific nazi tattoo? That's even more absurd than pretending he's just an edge lord and won't admit it.
No, don't you see, Quinn. There's nothing to be learned about someone based on what they do when they are drunk. We can't hold anyone accountable for their actions if they've had a couple of beers too many? I still don't understand why drunk driving is a crime -- I mean, he was drunk so whatta ya gonna do? "I only slept with that woman because I was drunk" isn't going to work at home, and I don't know why Eric thinks it works here.
So you will vote against anyone, no matter what, if they got drunk and did something stupid? (I mean, stupid, not criminal or horrific, like killing some poor kid while driving.)
I'm only responding to the thread, not making a meta-argument. And Eric is trying desperately to explain away the tattoo with "well, he was probably drunk", which I find to be ... less than convincing, and even less convincing as to the idea that it doesn't say *anything* about Platner.
Getting drunk and doing something stupid is not disqualifying. Nor is even what Platner did (assuming it was because he was drunk, even though I don't think that is his argument). But Eric's defense is off base.
I'm in Florida. I don't have a vote in Maine and I'm glad of that fact. The fact that Collins voted to impeach Trump is enough for me to say she is one of the good Republicans, regardless of the rest of her votes. And Platner seems like an asshole. So a tough call.
It’s not like he has a swastika on his chest. He got a random skull and crossbones tattoo in Croatia. Which he covered up in October.
It's actually worse tbh to get a more specific nazi tattoo than a less specific one imo. Esp as it, again, was popularized by concentration camp guards and the SS. He absolutely knew what he was doing. You think he never thought twice about what it meant ever again? Beyond absurd.
Yes, I think it’s very possible he accidentally got a totenkopf tattoo. And I think if he knew what it meant he wouldn’t have *released a video of him dancing shirtless after starting a campaign*
Your theory of the case is that he is a fan of the Nazis? Isn’t “it looks badass, and he didn’t bother to remove it” a plausible alternative?
but what about all the other stuff, about women in particular? It's pretty gross. And there's plenty of other stuff to get turned off by. Plus the sexting story just broke a couple of days ago. Is he sending pics of his private parts around? Is he another Anthony Wiener? He's either debilitatingly stupid, has major mental health issues, is drunk all day every day, or jsut a terrible person. None of those options means he should be governing anyone.
Agree 100%. The lesson from the Nazi tattoo is that Platner is dumb and just doesn’t think deeply about things.
When Platner says he didn’t know it was a Nazi symbol, I believe him, for the simple reason that *I myself* had never heard of this particular symbol even though I paid a lot more attention in history class than other students and am better read than most people.
If it were a swastika it’d be different, because even people who never paid attention in history class, never read, and only know about the Nazis from TV know that the swastika is a Nazi symbol. But the Nazis’ other symbols are obscure and known only to those who’ve studied Nazism in depth, which is only a tiny percentage of the population.
He didn’t know, because normal people don’t know. It’s that simple.
Prior to the news breaking about the tattoo if you'd been shown pictures of one hundred skull and crossbone tatoos could you have pointed to the right one and said, yes, *that's* the totenkopf.
I couldn't have.
Maybe he should have removed it immediately upon learning its origin but people are funny. That leads to the secondary question: does the tattoo he got while drunk provide evidence that he has Nazi sympathies? And if not, man, what are we arguing about?
They should demand better, but as a matter of the 2026 general election, they can't demand anything and it's too late.
I'm glad I'm not eligible to vote in Maine.
This wasn't a fait accompli, there was a primary!
And I would have voted for Platner over whatever is the name of the 90 year old governor! Turrible, just turrible.
I'm not aware of him bragging about his Nazi tattoo, at least not in those terms. I find it very believable he wasn't aware of the symbolism, and thought it was just a skull & crossbones.
I bet MLM people (Amway, Herbalife, etc) love you.
Did you know what the totenkopf looked like before the news here broke? Not me.
Drunken young Marines -- I mean, like, wow, who could imagine.
I'm just sick of the witch hunts. I'm tired of people who act like the most cynical, least charitable interpretation is obviously true & anyone who disagrees is naive or complicit. It's stupid, and people who do it in public should be called stupid, in public, as often as it takes.
Platner's not a Nazi. If he was, he would've recognized the totenkopf & wouldn't have tattooed it on his chest. I am begging everyone to just think about it for five minutes.
I’ve heard of a totenkopf and know what it signifies but even now I couldn’t identify one by sight, unless I choose to go Google it in a bit.
Yeah, it's possible to be critical of Netanyahu and also think that the Nazis are beyond the pale because of the Holocaust. Nazi symbolism is just straight old-fashioned anti-Semitism. This shouldn't be hard.
Everyone has such perfect knowledge they didn't have before the answer was handed them on a silver platter. I don't know about you, but prior to the news, I couldn't have picked the totenkopf out of a bunch of skull and crossbones for the life of me.
So, I agree, this shouldn't be hard. For very different reasons than you say, though.
I'm glad you're in this thread challenging people on this. I don't think I would like Platner, but the "Nazi tattoo" argument is driving me crazy. The totenkopf is not a recognizable symbol. It's a skull. There's a lot of douchebags out there with skull tattoos.
It was literally the symbol from the "Are we the baddies?" sketch from over a decade ago. He also had years before he ran for office to have it removed. Combine that with all of his weird edgelord behavior, this is a pattern of behavior of being an absolute moron and having no personal standards.
Nice reference. I'll repeat my question: prior to the news could *you* have accurately identified it as the Nazi tattoo? Maybe you could have (good for you); I couldn't have, and I suspect your average person couldn't have either.
In the meantime, if he's so obviously bad, why do so many people in Maine seem to like him?
Yes, I would have known what that was. According to people in his inner circle, he also knew what it was for years and referred to it as a totenkopf before he even ran for office.
I don't know about you either, but I know about me. I well knew what that symbol was. I don't think I'm particularly special.
Any decent person, having learned they’d accidentally gotten a Nazi tattoo, would get it covered at the first opportunity. He waited years, and didn’t cover it until he started running for Senate. In addition to retweeting antisemites and going on antisemitic podcasts. I don’t know whether he’s a Nazi, but he’s nowhere near as averse to Nazis as he should be.
Gotta push back on the idea that people only care about the tattoo to the extent it reflects opinions about Israel. My wife brought up Platner last night and was legit angry at the idea that someone with a Totenkopf tattoo was running for Senate. She didn't mention Israel once in the conversation, and anyway isn't "pro-Israel" in a factional sense. She just thought it reflected very poor judgment and temperament.
The Nazis targeted and killed lots of people, not just the Jews. Gypsys, gay & lesbians, the disabled, mixed-race people. Not everything is about Israel, Gaza and the Jews.
What does that have to do with what I said?
I'm agreeing with you. Lots of reasons to hate Nazis and some of them have nothing to do with Israel or Jewish people.
Got it. Fwiw, my wife and I are both Jewish (though you couldn't know that). My wife believes that the tattoo is evidence that Platner is antisemitic.
The guy has a Nazi tattoo, is incredibly critical of Israel, and is a stated fan on an antisemitic podcast. How much grace are we supposed to give him? If we heard that Susan Collins had once had dinner with Nick Fuentes, it’d be used as proof of her secret Nazi inclinations. But somehow the guy with a literal Nazi tattoo deserves our discernment?
I'm not giving him grace. I think he's an idiot, though I suspect more in the edgelord sense than the legitimate antisemite sense.
Many Russians and Ukrainians…the Nazi’s went east too.
Nobody can seriously believe Platner is pro-Nazi though, right? Like, he absolutely does seem like the kind of guy who would drunkenly get a tattoo, later find out it’s a Nazi tattoo, find that funny and brag (probably drunkenly) about how ridiculous it is, and also not get it removed because he just doesn’t care that much. Sure, that kind of guy is also not who I want in the senate. But he’s not a Nazi.
I doubt he's pro-Nazi. He's probably just an idiot.
He walked around with that thing on his chest for twenty years - well after he was aware of the symbolism - and only covered it when it became a political liability. If I was a big enough idiot to accidentally get a racist tattoo, I’d be mortified and RUN to get it removed as soon as I found out.
So your theory is that he is a Nazi?
It’s the not caring that much about having a Nazi tattoo on his body that’s the problem.
Didn’t he use Nazi language when sexting? Combine that with the tattoo and why on Earth wouldn’t we think he’s pro-Nazi?
Those screen shots of the texts going around twitter are fake. As far as we know, Platner has never actually offered to "blitzkrieg that ass."
"Pro-Nazi" seems like a very high bar to clear when (last I checked, sigh) everybody basically agreed that Nazis were the bad guys.
It's a lower bar to clear to say that Platner is an enormous dipshit who is not qualified to sit in the Senate, and for me (ymmv) we don't need to clear the higher bar. It's just not very interesting.
Link?
Unironically I wonder if the gap in how perceive this could be based on how seriously you take tattoos are in the first place.
I am not a tattoo guy, and everytime I have had the idle thought of getting a tattoo it was something that at the time I cared about deeply and wanted a tattoo to represent that. (I actually remember when I was a teenager, my mom asked me what I thought about tattoos, and she told me that in college in the 80s she considered getting a Woody Allen tattoo and in retrospect, is glad she didn't; that scared me away from tattoos way more than any "you'll never get hired" scolding did, so if that was her aim, great parenting on her part.)
But some people get a *lot* of tattoos. Maybe their bad tattoos are closer to my bad tweets. A lot of people who I saw become more skeptical after the tattoo had been willing to shrug off the Reddit posts that were unveiled a few days before. I think voters on the ground thought of the two as closer together (and also did not think highly of the people trying to make these a campaign issue, which could also be what leads people to shrug off this round of scandals too).
A committed national socialist ideologue? Nah. But the man sported an SS tattoo for two decades, has a history of racist tweets, and is hostile to the only Jewish state. If you told me those three facts about any random person, I’d presume they hate Jews.
Yeah, I honestly don't even know much about Platner's views on Israel and I still think the Nazi tattoo is disqualifying.
Did Elon Musk give a Nazi salute? In that moment, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But all the other things he did cries out that he has fascistic tendencies so maybe the salute he gave was probative.
Platner gets a tattoo possibly for innocent (albeit boneheaded) reasons and maybe not. But, like with Elon, don't you need at least some other evidence that he has Nazi sympathies? And is there such evidence? Folks, the answer is "no." The tattoo is a synecdoche for . . . nothing.
You are of course free to feel strongly what you feel, but if we give up controls of our government to Trump/MAGA this easily then we'll get what we deserve.
I don't care if Platner is or isn't a Nazi. I think that it's bad for the Democratic Party's national brand to throw their support behind someone with a Nazi tattoo, and that it would be pressing to win a fight while ceding strength in the larger war.
And I respect your position. But I have to say this with all honesty: screw "the larger war." We're fighting to save our nation from these goons.
I stand with Churchill with how he saw the alliance with Stalin and the USSR:
"If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."
Right, and I think, tactically, it will hurt us in ALL the races for the midterms to have the reputation as the hypocritical party that backed a guy with a Nazi tattoo. We don't just need to win in Maine, we need to win a lot of races in November across the country, where there are a lot of swing voters susceptible to the message that both sides are bad so they may as well not vote or go for Republicans.
It's not about my morals. It's about how I think this makes us look nationally.
Standard response from Candidate X in State Y when asked, "I'm not interested in what's happening in Maine; that's an issue for the voters in Maine. I care about the voters in State Y and how they're suffering under Trump's corrupt and failed policies yadda yadda yadda."
We in the chattering classes are all wrapped up in this but I guarantee that 99% of the voters outside of Maine will never give a damn if they know about it at all.
The hypocrisy of progressive Democrats (Sirota etc.) just drives me nuts. Imagine a Republican candidate for federal office with a Nazi tattoo, a Reddit history of racist & genuinely sexist comments (blaming women for being raped, etc.), a DUI (this is surprisingly underreported), and now apparently sexting with 6-12 women (the number is from the Platner campaign this morning!) People would be foaming at the mouth if he had generic rightwing views.
I don't think Platner's secretly a Nazi, but I think he is probably a knucklehead. If you don't think that's a real issue, I'd just point you in the direction of Fetterman- supposedly progressive Blue Collar Coded Dude who has some genuinely bad votes now that he's in office, and appears to have genuine mental health struggles.
Not to uh reveal what state I live in, but I'm just going to write in Margaret Chase Smith and call it a day
Edit: I read Lisa C's comment's and I strongly agree with it. Even if Platner wins this particular seat, the damage to the Democratic brand nationally is pretty bad. 'Your party has the Senator with a Nazi tattoo and a bunch of racist & sex scandals' is just a terrible look. People saying 'well he's better than Collins' have the strategic mind of a goldfish
This would be more salient if the national Democratic brand wasn't already trash, even among their own voters. And it isn't trash because of upstarts like Platner, but because of the milquetoast moderates who have been in control of the party for more than a decade now, and in particular their perceived fecklessness as the the only vehicle for opposition to Trump.
Platner is pulling a Trump in that he has recognized and is now riding populist discontent against both his own party and Republican governance to political success. It may be hypocritical to only support it when it's your guy (or at least not the other guy) but that's more a result of the incentives of primaries, FPTP, and the various other ways our winner-take-all system distort our politics.
I don't fully buy MY's take that Mills was a fake-good candidate because she was old and not very popular as governor. Mamdani and Platner have learned from Trump that running against your own party in their own primary can be very successful when your own party is quite unpopular and ineffective. MY's take is based on the reasoning that you need to convince moderates to vote for you to win; Mamdani, Trump, and maybe now Platner's strategy is motivating people who are unlikely to vote to come out for you, specifically, because of this vague anti-establishment sentiment, along with some people from the opposite side who are also motivated by that sentiment (like the Trump to Mamdani voters we have seen reported on). It's irrational, but that seems like it just is the vibe in US politics now and likely going forward.
The Democratic brand is already a millstone around the neck of every candidate running in a state to the right of Pennsylvania. Your grand strategy is to turn around the Democratic Party's national brand by all but guaranteeing another two years of Trump judges to give Republican election-tampering and criminality a pass? I know you have a thing about whataboutism, but why do you think Pennsylvania voters are going to care about some guy in Maine when Mike Lee is out here publicly cheering when Democrats get attacked and killed? I honestly don't think anybody outside of Maine and a handful of very online individuals such as ourselves are paying attention.
I don't like Graham Platner's views on Israel, it's true, but I don't think he's a Nazi, and I haven't seen anyone claiming that he is. But the Nazi tattoo - and his subsequent disingenuousness over it - shows something: that's he's an edgelord who found it funny to play around with Nazi symbols until they became an embarrassment to him.
And - to turn the argument around - I don't think that progressives would accept that from a figure whose politics they disapproved of, whereas I can't frankly imagine moderates accepting it from a figure whose politics they approved of. I do think it is the progressives who are behaving hypocritically in this - another example of Gaza as the Omnicause which trumps everything else.
People who think Platner is an “edge lord” clearly have never spent time with blue collar men. “Haha yea I was drunk in the Marines and I got this tattoo and it turns out it’s some Nazi shit isn’t that fucking wild bro? Here have another shot!”
Why should someone with such poor judgment be a senator? If I got drunk and woke up with a Nazi tattoo, my first order of business would be removing it, not bragging about it.
Not saying he should. He probably shouldn’t! Literally just saying he’s not a Nazi.
That's what I said in the first place! He's definitely not a Nazi. But I called him an "edgelord" - which is far from being an actual Nazi - and you disagreed. But your account of him here makes him sound exactly like an edgelord - in other words, a person who says or does outrageous things, not because he believes in them, but because he likes the shock it causes. Because if he wasn't, he would have had the tattoo removed immediately, not spent time joking and laughing about it.
Now it's true that - as you correctly intuited! - I haven't spent much time socializing with blue-collar men. (Not that Platner is actually blue-collar by background, but that's another matter.) But to me, you simply make it sound that blue-collar male culture is a culture that is very open to edgelord behavior, and that is a problem when someone from that culture wants to appeal to the broader electorate, to many of whom that behavior is disqualifying. And again, I don't think progressives would accept that excuse from anyone but another progressive.
That is a pretty small motte you are in.
This is the correct take
Why is this a reason for him to be a senator?
He's a prep school kid larping as blue collar.
I guess he was larping as a Marine grunt in the middle of firefights in Ramadi and Fallujah over three tours. Typical prep school kid behavior.
Plenty of prep school kids go into the military. It doesn't mean they didn't come from money. There's a particular type of rich kid who adopts the aesthetic of a stereotype of the working class because it lets them be an edgelord. It's not that far off from guys who get white Rasta dreads or wear berets in college.
I feel like a see a bit of this from some anti-Platner people :
Motte: Platner had an offensive tattoo for a long time (this is true)
Bailey: Platner is a Nazi
In my experience its the opposite - at any criticism of the tattoo the pro platner people leap to: "so you think he's a Nazi? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? Go listen to his John Stewart podcast!"
I mean this is kind of how motte and bailey-ing works. Or it could go like this
Motte: Planter has weird edgelord personality traits and had a offensive tattoo
Bailey: Platner is an anti-Semitic bigot
Anyway the correct position is "Everyone can feel free to vote however they want"
I'd be interested to find someone who actually says this - not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen them. I literally haven't seen a single person claiming that the tattoo means that he's a Nazi - but maybe I've been looking in the wrong places ...
I don’t particularly think I see “Platner is a Nazi” at all
The politics are relevant to how you judge the tattoo. If someone with Nazi-adjacent politics had this tattoo, you’d have more questions about whether they were an actual Nazi. I think this blog made the analogy earlier—like when you see Jordan Peterson having communist propaganda posters decorating his house no one thinks he’s a secret communist, but if you had Hasan Piker with those same decorations you would wonder about it.
Susan Collins voted for the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump in 2021. I figure there is a non-zero chance (maybe 10%, 20%?) Trump endorses Platner.
I do wonder if Platner has a narrow lane to do this a la Mamdani’s by-most-conventional-accounts-successful visit to the White House.
The "my opponent was mean to you, dear leader" lane is very, very wide and runs straight into the White House (with an exit for the Justice Department). The more I think about it, I wouldn't bet against it at even a 30% chance he endorses Platner.
Did she vote for John thune? Did she confirm most of Trump’s cabinet picks? She’s voted with republicans 90% since 2024 in a light blue state. She’s going to lose. Her age is another factor.
None of which is relevant to my comment.
It’s 0%. For all the reasons I listed.
Cornyn was a much more reliable Trump supporter and that didn't save him (albeit in the primary). I'd gladly take the other side of your "0% chance" bet.
Cornyn isn’t in a light blue state. Tx hasn’t elected a Dem to the senate since the 80s.
Trump as stupid as he is is not that stupid. He knows Collins is the most important Senator in the whole body for him: A Republican from a blue state who will always be there for him when she's most needed. The contrast with Cassidy couldn't be clearer: vote for Trump's conviction and find yourself tossed aside for another MAGA person in a deep red state.
Surprisingly, this is one area where I have a lower opinion of Trump than you appear to have. I don't think Trump cares AT ALL about the Republican Party except to the extent he can wear it as a skin suit over his personal pursuits. I don't think he sees Collins any differently than Cassidy, Cornyn, Mamdani or Platner. They are all just enemies to him, some near and some far.
I can't get behind Platner because I think in the long run, Democrats lose too much moral high ground in exchange for a shot at a Senate seat. It just fortifies the opinions of the "both sides are bad" swing voters to support a guy with a Nazi tattoo. It makes us look like hypocrites, which is a smear Republicans already love to throw at us and which does find an audience among swing voters. I think ultimately Democrats throwing their weight behind Platner will weaken us on a national level.
As someone who finds Trump nauseating and votes Democrat when I vote at all, but who doesn't identify as a Democrat...
Yes, can confirm. Platner makes y'all look really bad to me.
Platner just seems like a weird moron. In a better world this would be disqualifying. In this world we get Platner and Paxton
Fetterman should be a warning to Dems about getting behind someone too weird. Best case scenario, Platner wins and he votes like Angus King and doesn't rock the boat. More likely he's going to break with the caucus at inopportune moments and cause headaches for six years (or just loses outright to Collins, which should cause Chuck Schumer to resign his leadership role).
The funniest outcome would be if Platner switches parties.
Since everyone is discussing the tattoo I’ll offer my 2c. I believe Platner’s claim that he got it because he picked something that looked cool off the tattoo parlor wall when he was in his 20s without knowing the history of it. I don’t believe that he only found out it was a Nazi symbol last year. Should’ve gotten it covered up earlier; fact that he didn’t shows poor judgement.
One of a long list of things showing extremely poor judgement.
Platner is a boob. No one knows what he'd be like in the Senate. At least Susan Collins will revert to normal once the midterms are over and Trump is clearly a lameduck president. We need moderates of her caliber in the Senate, no matter what party she belongs to.
I would have clicked 'like' in 2015, alas. 2015 was a different universe.
I'm assuming that there will be a reset in the GOP -- at least in the Senate -- after the midterms. Trump is already faltering. Let's see. The only thing to recommend Platner is pure Democratic parrtisanship. I mean, don't you agree that he's a clown? We already have too many clowns in the Senate.
Yes, of course he's a clown. There are already several or dozens of extremely high-impact freakish clowns (I'm staring at RFKjr, but there are many others) in the executive branch and Collins will vote to confirm more. I wish I thought better of her, but I don't.
So what you're saying is that a wild-card Democratic clown is better than a serious, moderate Republican. We really need to start thinking beyond Trump but many Democrats can think of nothing else. Anyway, nice chatting.
Bruce, you profoundly waste my time. Be gone.
Your snark speaks volumes. Is it a substitute for thought?
There's not going to be a reset. As long as Trump has the ability to end Senator's careers by endorsing primary opponents they'll bend the knee. While Trump is faltering among the electorate at large, a majority of GOP primary voters still have an almost cultish devotion to him.
I don’t assume a reset and can’t see why you do. The GOP is pure MAGA now, with or without Trump. The
Trump has already lost a midterm and a general election and this didn’t happen. I could maybe believe this in 2018 but it seems like wishful thinking now.
What are the worthwhile outcomes that her caliber has produced?
I’m not a Mainer, and I don’t pretend to know what’s best for your state. So I am sincere in my question.
See the link for some biographic information on Collins. She's not right on everything -- not by a long shot -- but I've never heard anyone question her seriousness, ethics, or intelligence. Normally I'd vote for a Democrat -- but Platner really does seem like a boob.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Collins
She does a lot of work at the committee level that's very bipartisan. She's a good chair on approps.
She may be moderate but has a reputation for giving in to the worst tendencies of the GOP and ultimately has little of a spine.
He wouldn't be "very concerned"... not being "very concerned" and giving Trump the finger instead is the only thing that matters.
I promise I have no problem with Platner’s criticism of Israel but I do have a problem with his Nazi tattoo. I simply don’t believe he didn’t know what it was. Do I believe he’s a “devotee of National Socialism”? No. I believe he is an arrogant, immature, aggressive edgelord with serious impulsivity problems. The texting - and being on Kik of all places! - is yet more evidence. The Reddit comments are more evidence still. I don’t know what I’d do if I lived in Maine. I do have relatives who live in Maine. They’re all old ladies (that’s who lives in Maine!) and reliable democrats. And they’re appalled and also struggling with the decision. Susan Collins is terrible for the country, but she’s been pretty good for Maine. That’s the dilemma.
This was a case of bad recruitment by establishment Dems as mentioned. Mills was the easy button but never made sense for the reasons stated. People complain all the time about Schumer for ideological reasons but I think the strongest case for new leadership is he has lost his political touch.
What’s most disqualifying about Platner is the very fact that he wants to be a Senator. The combination of Platner’s delusion and the cowardice of other Maine Democrats who chose not to run creates a toxic brew and gives Collins an opening she shouldn’t have had. I’m glad not to be a Mainer faced with this awful choice.
Edit: This was meant as a main-thread comment. But since it didn’t land there I’ll respond thusly to MikeV: We should at least give credit to Schumer for recognizing that Platner was a uniquely bad candidate, even if he didn’t respond appropriately by press-ganging Mills as a lousy opponent.
It’s a lot to ask a moderate to swallow both ideological and personalistic flaws though. Mamdani always seemed like an inexperienced, a little naive but a hardworking, competent and high IQ person who could learn on the job. Platner seems like a genuinely stupid person. If I was in Maine, I would still vote for him to prevent MAGAficiation of the judiciary though
My stance is that I can't stand Platner as a person but I'd vote for him over Collins because Senate control is on the line. That said, I'm extremely annoyed by everybody who is declaring that it's prudish pearl-clutching to think he's a generalized scumbag as well as a horrible husband for repeatedly cheating on his wife right after they got married when they were trying to have a child, even going to Norway for IVF, and she had a miscarriage.
Obviously, candidates with sordid and messy personal lives end up winning elections, but they tend to underperform their partisan baseline. Roy Moore and Herschel Walker lost races they should have won, and Trump won 2/3 elections but he lost the popular vote once, and he only won it by 1.5% the other time against a very flawed Democratic Party with high inflation and a massive influx at the border. Like, Ken Paxton is almost certainly going to underperform Greg Abbott and Republicans nationwide!
That said, most people aren't consistent about political morality, and are disinclined to admit what I did at the beginning of this comment, that I find Platner terrible but I'd vote for him anyways. They make excuses for their ideological allies and condemn their ideological opponents for the same behavior, like if Platner didn't say the right stuff about Israel, he'd have never gained traction in the first place! Similarly, there are a whole lot of moderate/centrist types who were poised to hate Platner long before the Nazi tattoo was uncovered or the sexting scandal was revealed because they hate his brand of economic populism, and they're definitely not being equinanamous in their condemnations of him.
He is bad because he is a leech, a fraud. He has whatever conditions are necessary to elicit money from the VA.
I just can't believe that this is the best Maine could do.
That said, I think I'd be a better Senator than Graham Platner. Do I want to run for the US Senate from [upper midwest state]? Fuck no, it sounds awful.
Platner is really getting into "anyone in the phone book would be better" territory. I really don't get how he got this far.
Seeing the top comments here, I have to take the other side.
I'm genuinely mystified why people care so much about the tattoo. I have to ask the people who say it's disqualifying- do you not know any military veterans? Any men who work blue collar jobs? I don't like Platner and probably wouldn't vote for him but geez what a complete non-issue!
Calibration- I work in the mining industry. Getting an offensive tattoo because you're on a bender and it looks cool on the wall then keeping it because it's a wild story? I know approximately 1 million dudes who would do that.
Not even gonna engage with the general argument on this one.
But I will poignantly maintain that SOMEONE on this thread will be WRONG, and that is NOT OK.
Probably Joseph. 😜
SOMEONE must stand up for RADICAL MILQUETOAST CENTRISM! Who among our number will BOLDLY rise to demand that things be TEN PERCENT BETTER?
What do we WANT, David?! I want PHASED IMPROVEMENT! When do we want it?! I want it over a timespan mostly agreeable to all stakeholders.
If you were really so radically reasonable, you’d be perfectly happy with 0.01% better, you disingenuous fool!
I am willing to negotiate downward.
Now ask yourself this:
Who do you trust more to negotiate themselves downward: Platner, or Harris?
*channeling Dark JVL*