Graham Platner—the oyster-farming former Marine from Downeast Maine who vocally supports LGBTQIA rights and is currently running to unseat Republican incumbent Susan Collins—has had a hell of a week, and it’s only Wednesday. Days after he faced backlash for controversial resurfaced old social media posts and Platner’s political director, Genevieve McDonald, resigned, Platner’s campaign revealed that Platner has a stylized skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest that appears to be a Totenkopf, or “death’s head”—a symbol associated with the Nazi party and white supremacy.
Platner says that he got the ink in 2007 during a drunken night out in Croatia with a few fellow machine gunners, and that he picked the image at random from options displayed on the wall of the tattoo parlor. Why did he choose it? “Skull and crossbar motifs are popular amongst military units,” Platner told Vanity Fair over the phone this morning. “They’re still popular today amongst military units around the world. I have seen a similar skull and crossbones on French Foreign Legion guys that I served with next to in Afghanistan. I’ve seen a very similar one on unit T-shirts from other American military units. I’ve always viewed it as a skull and crossbones tied to combat units.”
In conversation, Platner swears that he didn’t know the tattoo’s connotations until very recently; when asked whether he would have removed it if he’d been aware previously, he says that he’s already covered it up.
Since launching his campaign, Platner has had a meteoric rise: he’s raised more than $4 million in donations, and earned the endorsement of fellow New Englander Bernie Sanders. He’s already been the subject of extensive profiles in outlets including the New Yorker, The New Republic, and GQ. But news of his tattoo has stopped his momentum in its tracks. “There are some ‘Man, maybe Platner could be president someday’ texts in my phone that I’d like to take back,” one Slate staffer wrote.
The progressive voters of Maine are feeling similarly torn—though the ones I’ve spoken with are still tentatively supporting Platner. “Oh fuck, I just looked it up,” one enthusiastic 30-something Platner supporter told me Tuesday. He would still vote for Platner if the election happened tomorrow, he says, but the news is disappointing nonetheless. A progressive canvasser knocking doors in South Portland named Willow Cunningham tells me they doubt Platner is a crypto-Nazi; Boru O’Brien O’Connell, owner of the Portland gallery Dunes, agrees. “I’m a voter who wants to not fund genocide and to have universal healthcare,” he says. “That matters more to me than some old Reddit posts and a tattoo.”
Maine is small: O’Connell put me in touch with a childhood friend, Jesse Einhorn, whose parents turn out to know Platner’s. He wants to speak with people who know Graham personally before making any decisions. “I’m keeping my mind open though, because I think that none of it is objectively disqualifying,” Einhorn says. “And look, I’m Jewish, so I am kind of hypersensitive to all these things.” He’s on the same page as his father, David Einhorn—a retired lawyer who practiced in Ellsworth and used to play tennis with Platner’s father. “I think a lot of people would not recognize skull and crossbones as associated with the Nazis,” says the elder Einhorn. “It’s a tattoo. I don’t think it’s significant.”
Below, Platner describes how he covered up the tattoo, his thoughts on where the oppo research against him is coming from, and what he’d rather be talking about instead.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Vanity Fair: Your former political director has described you as a military history buff, and said that you now know what your tattoo means—even if you didn’t when you got the tattoo. At what point exactly did you realize what the symbol means?
Graham Platner: Oh, when this all came out.
Who told you what it means?
Even last week, a few weeks ago, somebody asked me if I had a white supremacist tattoo and I laughed at them. I thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard.
When you say someone—someone from the media? Someone from your campaign?
Someone—[it] would’ve been a question if I had a white supremacist tattoo. And I said, of course not. That’s insane, because I’m not now nor ever have been anyone that. In fact, I’ve lived a life dedicated against antisemitism. This is a core of who I am as a person, which, I will say, makes all of this essentially doubly insulting. But then late last week, someone reached out to the campaign—I forget from what news outlet—saying there was this story that I have some kind of white supremacist slash hate tattoo. I want to make this clear: I joined the United States Army with this tattoo. I went to MEPS [a Military Entrance Processing Station]. When you join the service, you get checked for gang and hate tattoos. I went to work for the State Department as a contractor with a full physical, which does the exact same thing. I have had this tattoo for 18 years. My sister-in-law is Jewish, and so is my extended family.
Your sister-in-law who you are singing to in the video?
That is correct. And I take my shirt off all the time, because I work on a boat. I’ve been going through life with this thing, and it has literally never come up. So I don’t mean to get defensive—but there’s an absurdity here. If I thought that I had a Nazi tattoo, I would not have just been taking my shirt off in front of everybody. I just had a skull and crossbones that I got when I was in the Marine Corps.
Would you have removed it if someone had said something to you—
Already? Of course. It’s already gone.
How is it gone?
It’s been covered up.
With?
With some kind of Celtic knot with a dog on it, because that’s far more in line with my opinions about nature and animals now than my connection to the violence that I partook in when I was a young man.
Did you go to a local tattoo parlor for the coverup?
I don’t want to bring them into it. I can send you a picture of it, though. [Ed. note: Platner’s camp had not yet sent the photo by press time.] I don’t want this on my body, if that’s how people see it. But for 20 years, I’ve had it, and I’ve been taking my shirt off in the gym and living my life with this thing, and it’s never come up.
That gets me also—every breath I have to spend talking about this is a breath that I’m not talking about the problems that we’re trying to fight against here in the state of Maine. The reason that opposition research happens is to rip people’s lives apart, and make regular human beings think that politics is something they would never want to get involved in. I understand that, because this is brutal. It is not fun. I was called a communist last week, and a Nazi this week. And that is utterly absurd to anybody who knows anything about politics.
Can you elaborate on who you believe the opposition research was coming from?
Yeah—it’s coming from Washington, DC. I am not the chosen candidate of the DC establishment. [That] was made abundantly clear to us when we were looking to announce this thing. And it’s been made abundantly clear to me that in the leadership of the Democratic Party and the people that choose candidates and campaigns, I am not the kind of person they want. That’s what this is. The idea that I’m supposed to not see any correlation between the governor getting in the race, and then the next day all this oppo research dropping against me—the idea that I’m supposed to not see what this is, and the idea that people in Maine aren’t going to notice what this is? I think that is laughable. [Ed. note: Mills did not immediately respond to a request for comment.]
Chuck Schumer did endorse Janet Mills yesterday. What’s your take on that?
Of course he did. They’ve been pressuring her to do this the whole time. So that does not surprise me in the slightest.
You have said that when you were planning to launch this campaign, you received letters from the Democratic establishment telling you not to. Who were those notes coming from?
I didn’t receive letters. People reached out to people on the campaign.
Who were those people?
From Washington. It was made abundantly clear to me that we were supposed to wait our turn, and that we didn’t have the right to do this—which I will say as a Democrat, I find that fundamentally flawed. I think primaries are good. I think primaries are part of the democratic process. I think anyone who is able to raise the money and build a campaign should be able to run for a seat in the party that they are a member of. I think that that is a good thing. And very early on, it was made clear to us that if we did this, they were going to tear my life apart.
And that is a threat. But I don’t care. My marriage, my friends, the town of Sullivan, Maine, my neighbors, my actual community—those people know who I am, and they love me. And I love them. I am in this because I care about Maine. That is why I’m doing this. I care about the fact that people cannot afford houses here; I care about the fact that the healthcare system is literally collapsing. I’m not in this for my ego. They can call me a communist, they can call me a Nazi. They can rip my life apart and threaten me. I don’t care. All that does is steal my resolve.
I’ve been talking to voters in Maine about this, and about the Reddit posts. It’s been raising interesting conversations about digital footprints and what we should expect from our politicians. You recently posted Trump’s entry in Epstein’s birthday book with the caption, “Trump and Epstein are sick fucks.” Trump ostensibly made that drawing more than 20 years ago. What makes something like that different from your old posts?
Well, one, because I fully admit that I did my old posts. I’m not trying to cover anything up. We all have internet histories; I was not planning on running for office. The big difference there is that I was posting on Reddit, and Donald Trump was writing a birthday card to someone who was trafficking children. I would say that that is the difference.
In recent days, there have been revelations about a 2024 group chat with Paul Ingrassia in which he wrote, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time,” among other things. Do you think that that’s a disqualifying statement?
Absolutely. A hundred percent. By the way, you’ll never find a single utterance of mine in which I have any affiliation or affinity for racism or antisemitism or Nazism. I grew up a little punk rock kid on the Dead Kennedys and the Dropkick Murphys. Hating Nazis has been something I have been into since I was about 12. Somebody in politics saying that they themselves believe that they have a little bit of a Nazi streak is absolutely disqualifying. There is no space in American politics for Nazis.
Do you think that America writ large has a Nazi problem?
Yes, of course. America has a serious antisemitism problem, as does the world for that matter. You see it in this Young Republican stuff. Some of these people hold positions of power in campaigns and in political organizations. They are actively making jokes—legitimately racist, and not in a jokey way. That isn’t funny. That’s a problem. And the cancer of racism, the cancer of antisemitism, the cancer of Nazism, this is something that needs to be excised from the American body politic. It is something that we need to be fighting against every day.
Bernie Sanders has said that he continues to support your campaign. Have you had contact with him since the news broke?
Yes.
What has he said?
I spoke with him the other day. He understands that this is a hit job. He knows that they’re coming after me with everything they’ve got. He understands that I am not a secret Nazi. I have an entire open and easily accessible life for anyone to look at to know that that is not true.
In a Politico article today, sources reportedly familiar with the opposition file say that there is more coming down the pike. Are you aware of what that is?
People have been telling us rumors. I don’t know what else there could be. This is what they have: they have Reddit posts, and they have a tattoo I got in the Marine Corps. Whatever is coming is going to be nonsense. I haven’t lived a boring life, but I’ve lived a simple life, and I’ve also lived a very open life.
They’re never going to stop. And the reason they’re never going to stop is because they know that when it comes to talking about issues, when it comes to talking about affordability, when it comes to talking about the things that have made my campaign so spectacularly successful here in the state of Maine, they don’t want to talk about those things at all. And so they’re just going to continue to make stuff up. We’re going to continue to talk about the issues. We’re moving forward. They think they’re going to break me. And I can tell you right now, they are not going to break me.
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