Graham Platner has a Nazi tattoo on his chest.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (and anyone with a functioning brain and an iota of knowledge about the last 100 years of our shared history) the image resembles a Totenkopf, a skull-and-crossbones symbol used by Hitler's SS during the systematic murder of millions. Platner says he got it drunk in Kosovo in 2007, thought it was just a scary skull, and never realized its Nazi associations until reporters started calling. He's promised to get it removed.
Meanwhile, he's staying in the race for U.S. Senate in Maine.
Ten years ago, this story ends with Platner withdrawing from politics in disgrace. Today, he's got Bernie Sanders' endorsement and appears to be attempting to ride it out. The immediate reaction from most observers has been to frame this as Democrats finally learning from Trump's playbook. If Republicans can ignore scandals, why should Democrats fall on their swords?
The simple answer to which is: Democrats don’t get a pass on Nazi nonsense just because they’re Democrats. Nazis are bad. Nazi things are bad. If your opinion on Nazi things depends on your tribal allegiance, that’s also bad.
Start with the basic facts. Platner served in the Marines and later the Army. He passed background checks for security clearances. He worked on the Ambassador to Afghanistan's security detail. At some point across those two decades and multiple vetting processes, someone presumably looked at that tattoo. Maybe they saw a generic skull. Maybe they saw exactly what it was and decided not to make an issue of it. Maybe nobody looked closely enough. Any of these possibilities tells us something uncomfortable about institutional competence.
But let's take Platner at his word. Let’s offer an olive branch that was certainly never made available to the victims of the SS et al. Let’s say he genuinely didn't know. He picked a design off a wall while drunk and has worn it for eighteen years without anyone explaining its significance to him. What does that scenario reveal? Either his social circle was so insular that nobody ever mentioned it, or they did mention it and he's lying now, or the symbol is less universally recognized than we assume and we’ve already begun to forget the vagaries and violence of the NSDAP. None of these options is particularly reassuring.
I find myself stuck on one question: does it actually matter whether he knew? The ADL is careful to note that "sometimes people get tattoos without understanding their hateful association." They're giving him an out. But the image on his chest represents an organization responsible for industrial-scale genocide. Ignorance seems like a remarkably thin defense, even if it's technically true.
This is where the Trump comparison does become relevant. Trump didn't succeed by being shameless about genuine scandals. He succeeded by creating so much noise that people stopped being able to distinguish signal from static. When everything is scandalous, nothing is. When every controversy gets the same level of outrage, voters tune out entirely.
Platner's situation sits in an awkward middle ground. The tattoo is genuinely troubling. His previous online comments about military sexual assault and Black Americans' tipping habits are genuinely problematic. But they're being reported alongside the fact that he once criticized police officers and rural Americans, as though these things exist on the same moral plane. The result is a kind of flattening effect where serious issues get bundled with political disagreements until the whole thing starts to feel like partisan noise.
His former political director quit last week and says he should have known what the tattoo meant. She worked for him, presumably saw him in casual settings, and apparently never raised this issue while on staff. Only after leaving does she suggest he's lying about his ignorance. This pattern repeats across modern political scandals: insiders stay quiet until they become outsiders, then suddenly find their voices. The cynic in me wonders how many people in Platner's orbit knew about the tattoo, knew about the old posts, and calculated that raising concerns would cost them their positions without stopping his campaign.
Twenty years ago, party leadership would have applied pressure behind the scenes to force candidates like Platner out. Today, that pressure mechanism seems to have broken down. Partly this reflects a genuine democratization of candidate selection. Partly it reflects learned helplessness after watching Trump survive everything. Partly it's a recognition that forcing candidates out creates its own backlash.
I keep circling back to what bothers me most about the Platner story. Nobody involved comes out looking good. Platner either wore Nazi imagery for eighteen years without caring enough to learn what it meant, or he knew and is lying. His former staffer either failed to raise concerns when it mattered or is weaponizing those concerns now for personal reasons. The institutions that vetted him either missed an obvious red flag or dismissed it as unimportant. The media is reporting it alongside politically partisan gripes as though they're equivalent. Sanders is sticking with his endorsement because... why exactly? Because withdrawing it would seem weak?
Everyone understands the rules have changed but nobody quite knows what the new rules are. Scandals that would have ended careers now get shrugged off. But which scandals? And for whom? Republicans can point to Trump and say their voters don't care about personal controversies. Democrats can point to Republican hypocrisy and say they're tired of being the only ones held accountable. Both sides have a point. Both sides are also engaged in a race to the bottom.
The voters, supposedly the ultimate arbiters in all this, get caught in an impossible bind. How are ordinary people supposed to distinguish between genuine disqualifying behavior and partisan attacks when both get packaged identically? When journalists report a Nazi tattoo alongside criticism of police in the same article, what signal are they sending about relative importance? When former staffers stay silent until politically convenient, what does that teach voters about institutional credibility?
Maybe Platner loses his primary to Janet Mills. Maybe voters do ultimately hold him accountable. But the fact that we've arrived at "maybe voters will give a damn” as our last line of defense against candidates with Nazi tattoos suggests something has gone badly wrong with our filtering mechanisms. We've replaced institutional gatekeeping with crowd-sourced accountability, and the crowd is exhausted, confused, and increasingly cynical about whether any of this matters.
I don't have a solution here. Bringing back smoke-filled rooms where party bosses pick candidates isn't viable or desirable. But watching Democrats learn from Trump's example that you can just brazen your way through scandals feels like watching someone learn exactly the wrong lesson. Yes, Trump proved that survival is possible. He did not prove that survival is good.
I think we should be able to reach one simple agreement on one simple fact: having a Nazi tattoo is inexcusable, whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican or a skinhead at a football match. Don’t call it a purity test, folks - it’s a basic standard of human empathy and morality.
