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Graham Platner—and His Mom—Try to Move Past Tattoo Scandal at a Maine Town Hall

October 23, 2025
in News, Politics
Graham Platner—and His Mom—Try to Move Past Tattoo Scandal at a Maine Town Hall
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It’s 3:58 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, and Graham Platner’s campaign is sending me shirtless photos. I’m about to drive an hour to Ogunquit, Maine to attend Platner’s first town hall since the surfacing of unsavory and offensive deleted Reddit posts kicked off a week of tumultuous headlines for the oyster farmer turned politician, the Bernie Sanders–anointed Democratic frontrunner in the Senate race to unseat Susan Collins. And in this case, sending half-naked photos to a journalist isn’t the latest scandal—it’s fact-checking backup.

In the two days since Platner’s campaign revealed that, for years, the candidate had a chest tattoo that starkly resembled a “Totenkopf” used in SS insignia and neo-Nazi iconography, the story has lived several online lives. By the time Platner spoke to me about it Wednesday morning, he had already gotten the tattoo covered with a Celtic knot and a dog. In a video posted that day to his campaign Instagram, Platner once again claimed that he only recently learned of the tattoo’s “stark resemblance to a symbol that is used by neo-Nazis,” and that “the idea that I’ve been going around with something like that utterly horrifies me.” The controversy puts a fine point on questions of “cancellation” and accountability that the left has been grappling with for years. In the comments, a tattoo artist and 2023 Acadia National Park artist in residence named Mischa Ylva Ostberg, who uses the pronouns they/them, took credit for the coverup, writing, “People are capable of change, reflection, and growth. I know his character because he plays a vital role in my small community everyday.”

But in other corners of the internet, the coverup spawned more controversy. On Bluesky and X, users debated whether the new tattoo might also have neo-Nazi connotations—white supremacists having coopted various runic symbols—and pointed out that a different tattoo, partially visible in an image of Platner from a local news interview, included the numbers 1919. Online sleuths wondered if this could be code for “SS,” S being the 19th letter of the alphabet—but Platner’s full tattoo, a photo of which his campaign shared with Vanity Fair and other outlets, tells a different story. The full picture shows a mountain overlaying crossed pick-axes with the letters TFC, an acronym for the Appalachian Mountain Club’s professional White Mountain trail crew (“Trail Fucking Crew”). The tattoo also includes two years: 2002 (when Platner worked the trails) and 1919 (the date the Mountain Club founded its first crew). Amid the tattoo turmoil, the Advocate ran a story looking back at more posts Platner wrote between 2016 and 2021, which “include homophobic slurs, anti-LGBTQ+ jokes, and sexually explicit stories denigrating gay men.” Platner apologized for the posts, calling them the “indefensible” product of having “talked a lot of shit on the internet,” and saying that he had testified earlier this year at a local school board meeting in defense of protection policy for LGBTQ students.

Around 600 people turned out for Platner’s town hall in Ogunquit, population 1,577; many of them traversed rainbow crosswalks on their way into the town’s Leavitt Theater. A torrential downpour gave way to a golden sunset. As the crowd filed into the 500-seat theater and its overflow areas, country musician Griffin William Sherry sang and played guitar, including a song called “We Will Fight”—which he said he’d written for his wife on June 25, the day after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

Soon, Platner’s mother, restaurant owner and former DNC delegate Leslie Harlow, took the mic. It was her first time at one of Platner’s town halls. “Geez, Ma,” she joked, imagining her son’s response. “We’ve been doing this for a month. What?” She shared stories of Platner’s upbringing, including his parents’ dismay when he told them, following his high school graduation at the onset of the Iraq War, that he had enlisted. With visible emotion, she described how disappointed she was to see politicians fail to show up to Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps Base in North Carolina where families could visit servicemen between deployments.

“Applause for my mother,” Platner said as he took the stage, alluding to his tough week by saying that even throughout “struggles and challenges,” his parents had always stood by him. “I went from being a communist on Thursday to a Nazi on Monday,” Platner said, to laughter. “If anybody’s done any of the reading, that’s a rather hard political trajectory to navigate.” He then addressed the tattoo more seriously, acknowledging there are things in his past he isn’t proud of. “And now,” he said, “I would like to get back to talking about wealth inequality and Medicare for all.”

Platner is a powerful, straightforward speaker, preaching about a future in which tax dollars go to community support rather than “funding somebody else’s genocide,” and repeatedly emphasizing the importance of organizing. He promised to remain accessible: “I think we’ve held 25 more town halls than Susan Collins has since Bill Clinton was President.” He drew a line between Democratic party leaders and downballot Democrats, as well as the party’s voters, saying that “if the party was run by the people that were in it, it would be the party you want it to be.”

Following his speech, Platner picked questions haphazardly from the crowd, kicking off with one about his recent controversies. The questioner noted, as Platner had in our conversation that morning, that the surfacing of oppo research against him correlated with Maine Governor Janet Mills entering the senate race. (A new poll, released Thursday, has Platner leading Mills substantially, by a margin of 58 percent of Maine Democratic primary voters for Platner to 24 percent for Mills.) “I don’t want to minimize” his past words, Platner said, “but I will just say the machine is turned on because it is scared, the machine has been turned on because they feel threatened.” (Mills didn’t respond to VF’s Wednesday request for comment.)

Questions about public education and fighting misinformation elicited responses about Platner’s wife, a public school teacher of fifteen years, and governmental apathy. (He asked a rhetorical question about whether Americans born after 9/11 have seen any good things come from the government, eliciting the only dissent I heard during the town hall: “We elected Obama,” a woman behind me muttered.)

He spoke about understanding why people voted for Trump: “People aren’t stupid. They might be misinformed, they might be propagandized, but they’re not stupid. They understand that they’re getting screwed and we need to tell ’em that they are getting screwed, but they’re not being screwed by immigrants. They’re not being screwed by trans kids. They’re being screwed by the same people that have been screwing us the entire time, and that is this class that is the upper echelons, the rich, the ultra powerful, the corporate interests.” A self-identified libertarian closed out the question period by asking about term limits, which Platner full-throatedly endorsed.

Filing out of the auditorium, I found myself walking beside Platner’s mom, who agreed to an impromptu interview in the foyer. She described the past week as “painful,” saying it “brought up a lot of this past that as his mother I shared with him—but also we had had such resolution about everything and everybody moving forward. So it was just sort of like this rogue wave that moved back in.” She said in recent years, she and others had encouraged her son to run for legislature. What was the tipping point? “He’s always been a Bernie fan,” Harlow said. She also alluded to conversations with coalition-builders like Jason Shedlock, president of the Southern Maine Labor Council, who participated in the search for a Democratic candidate to take on Collins, as well as Platner’s now-advisors Morris Katz and Joe Calvello. ”Graham also was a Maine state wrestling champion in high school. And when you think about the philosophy and dynamics of what wrestling is, it’s a team, but it’s an individual sport,” she said. In this political fight, “He’s on the mat by himself—and especially this week with everything that happened. But he’s also on a team.”

The post Graham Platner—and His Mom—Try to Move Past Tattoo Scandal at a Maine Town Hall appeared first on Vanity Fair.

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