PORTLAND, Maine — Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner revealed Tuesday that he was tattooed years ago with an image widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, but he dismissed the connotation and attributed it to trying to scare a drunken Marine. He said he plans to have the tattoo removed.
Platner is the latest Democratic candidate to ignore dark revelations about his past, reflecting a new political era and an example set by President Donald Trump, who has moved forward undaunted by controversies that would have ended his campaign only a decade ago.
New revelation about Platner draws closer behind the discovery of a series of controversial online statementsincluding one in which he rejected sexual assault in the military. It also follows a pattern defined by Jay Jonesthis year’s Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, who refused to withdraw from the race even after text messages surfaced in which he suggested in 2022 that a prominent Republican in the state should receive “two bullets to the head.”
Jones apologized for those comments, which also included the suggestion that his then-Republican opponent’s children would suffer the same fate. Jones remained in the race for Virginia’s Nov. 4 election, saying it’s up to voters to judge his qualifications for office. The scandal over them spilled over into the gubernatorial race, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger had to address them several times.
Old Platner posts raise new questions
Platner, a Democrat and oyster farmer, had generated buzz among Maine progressives, particularly from two-term Gov. Janet Mills last week. entered the Democratic race for U.S. Senate. The two Democrats have been vying for the opportunity to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins for 30 years.
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills greets lawmakers before delivering her State of the State address, Jan. 30, 2024, at the State House in Augusta, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, file)
Platner attempted to explain his past online comments in a video posted to social media last week. In it, he addresses not only his previous comments dismissing military sexual assault, but also his questioning of the gratification habits of black customers and his criticism of police officers and rural Americans.
“I see someone I don’t recognize,” he said in the five-minute apology video.
Platner sought to further distance himself from the comments, posted online between 2013 and 2021, during an interview on the Democratic podcast Pod Save America that was published Tuesday, describing them as the ramblings of a recent military veteran.
“It was a time where I hadn’t been exposed to things yet, and I had an opinion or thoughts that were colored by my experience in the service,” he said during the podcast.
But Platner himself spoke about the tattoo, which he said he received in 2007, when he was in his 20s. He said he got it in Kosovo while on leave with the Marines during a night of drinking. A video played during the podcast shows Platner dancing shirtless with the tattoo visible on his upper chest.
He said he and his fellow Marines chose “a terrifying skull and crossbones on the wall because we were Marines and, you know, skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing,” Platner said.
The prominent anti-Semitism advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League reviewed the video and recognized the tattoo image as a specific symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, or SS, responsible for the systematic murders of millions of Jews and others in Europe during World War II.
“This appears to be a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, and if true, it is troubling that a candidate for high office would have one,” Oren Segal, senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence for the Anti-Defamation League, said in an email response to an Associated Press inquiry. “We understand that sometimes people get tattoos without understanding their hateful association. In these cases, the wearer should be asked if they repudiate its hateful meaning.”
Platner on the meaning of the tattoo: it was never mentioned
In a statement to The Associated Press on Tuesday evening, Platner said: “It wasn’t until I started hearing from reporters and DC insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol. I absolutely would not have lived my life with this on my chest if I had known that – and to insinuate that was the case is disgusting. I am already planning to have it removed.”
Platner added that in the 20 years since he got the tattoo, he enlisted in the military, “which involved a full medical exam that examined the tattoos for symbols of hate. I also passed a full background check to receive a security clearance to join the ambassador’s security detail in Afghanistan.” The idea of his tattoo as a Nazi symbol was never discussed, he said.
But a former Platner staffer said he should have known better.
“Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have hid it because he knows very well what it means,” Platner’s former political director, Genevieve L. McDonald, who left the campaign last week, said Tuesday.
Platner will run against Mills in next year’s primary.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Platner, stuck by the candidate, telling reporters Tuesday that Platner was “a great candidate.”
“I’m going to support him,” Sanders added.
Democrats follow in Trump campaign’s footsteps
The episodes, including Jones’ explosive revelations in Virginia, follow a decade in which Trump rewrote the norms for what can derail a campaign.
Trump won the 2016 presidential election even after the release of recordings made 11 years earlier of him speaking to an “Access Hollywood” reporter in which he boasted in obscene terms about making sexual advances toward women who were not his wife. Trump also mentioned “very good people, on both sides” from a 2017 episode in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman protesting a white nationalist demonstration was run over and killed by a white supremacist in her car.
Most recently, Trump was elected to a second non-consecutive term in 2024 after being impeached twice during his first term and then found guilty of 34 counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump has denied the allegation.
“I think Democrats feel that if Republicans can ignore calls to stand down, why can’t we?” said Todd Belt, director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.
During a campaign debate with the attorney general last week, Jones raised the issue, referencing Trump’s speech urging his supporters to turn out in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, before many of them stormed the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots.
“What about when Donald Trump used inflammatory language to incite a riot in an attempt to overturn an election here in this country? » said Jones.
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa, Kruesi from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti in Washington also contributed to this report.
