PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine 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 chalked it up to a drunken Marine’s attempt at fearsomeness.
Platner is the latest in a line of Democratic candidates to shrug off dark revelations about their past, reflecting a new era in politics and an example set by President Donald Trump, who has forged ahead undaunted by controversies that would have been campaign-ending discoveries only a decade ago.
The new revelation about Platner comes close behind the discovery of a series of controversial online statements, including one in which he dismissed sexual assault in the military. It also follows a pattern set by Jay Jones, this year’s Democratic nominee for attorney general of Virginia, who has refused to drop out of the race even after text messages surfaced in which he suggested in 2022 that a prominent state Republican should get “two bullets to the head.”
Jones apologized for the comments, which also included the suggestion that his then-Republican opponent’s children face the same fate. Jones has stayed in the race for the Nov. 4 Virginia election, saying it’s up to voters to judge his qualifications for the office. The scandal over them has spilled over into the governor’s race, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger has had to address it repeatedly.
Platner’s old posts raise new questions
Platner, a Democrat and oyster farmer, had sparked buzz among progressives in Maine, notably since two-term Gov. Janet Mills last week entered the Democratic race for U.S. Senate. The two Democrats are vying for the chance to challenge 30-year incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Platner attempted to explain his past online comments in a video posted to social media last week. In it, he addressed not only his previous comments dismissing military sexual assaults, but also his questioning Black patrons’ gratuity habits and criticizing 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 posted Tuesday, describing them as the ramblings of a recent military veteran.
“That was a moment in time when I had not yet been exposed to things, and I had an opinion or I had thoughts that were colored by my experience in the service,” he said during the podcast.
But Platner himself brought up the tattoo, which he says 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 aired 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 looking skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines and, you know, skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing,” Platner said.
The prominent antisemitism advocacy group, the Anti-Defamation League, reviewed the video and recognized the image in the tattoo as a specific symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, or SS, which was 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, the Anti-Defamation League’s senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence, said in an email response to an Associated Press inquiry. “We do understand that sometimes people get tattoos without understanding their hateful association. In those cases, the bearer should be asked whether they repudiate its hateful meaning.”
Platner on tattoo meaning: ‘It never came up’
Still, Platner did not immediately repudiate the symbol’s meaning during the interview, except to say, “I am not a secret Nazi.”
“I’ve also just lived my entire life as a regular person with a skull and crossbones on their chest,” he said. “At no point in this entire experience of my life did anybody ever once say, ‘Hey, you’re a Nazi.’ It never came up.”
But a former top Platner staffer said he should have known.
“Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means,” Platner’s former political director Genevieve L. McDonald, who quit the campaign last week, said in a Facebook post Tuesday.
Platner is running against Mills in next year’s primary.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has endorsed Platner, was sticking with the candidate, telling reporters on Tuesday that Platner is “an excellent candidate.”
“I’m going to support him,” Sanders added.
Democrats follow in Trump’s campaign footsteps
The episodes, including Jones’ explosive revelations in Virginia, follow a decade of Trump rewriting the standard for what can derail a campaign.
Trump won the 2016 presidential election even after recordings surfaced that had been made 11 years earlier of him speaking to an “Access Hollywood” reporter in which he boasted in lewd terms about making sexual advances toward women who were not his wife. Trump also referred to “very fine people, on both sides” of a 2017 episode in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman who was protesting against a white nationalist demonstration was run down and killed by a white supremacist in his car.
More recently, Trump was elected to a second, non-consecutive term in 2024 after being twice impeached during his first term and later being convicted on 34 criminal counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump denied the allegation.
“I think there’s a sense among Democrats that if Republicans can ignore calls to bow out, why can’t we?” said Todd Belt, director of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.
During an attorney general campaign debate last week, Jones raised the very issue, referring to Trump’s speech urging his supporters to contest the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, before many of them stormed the U.S. Capitol in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.
“What about when Donald Trump used incendiary language to incite a riot to try to overturn an election here in this country?” Jones said.
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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.
