Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has been under fire this week after revelations that he has a skull tattoo associated with Germany’s Nazi Party on his chest. On Wednesday, he announced that it has been covered up.
In an interview with Vanity Fair published on Wednesday, Platner said that the tattoo has been covered up 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.” Platner has not released yet a photo of his new tattoo.
The oyster farmer turned progressive political candidate vehemently denied any connections or affinity to Nazism, saying that he got the tattoo on a drunken night out in Croatia in 2007 while serving in the Marines. A video posted to Instagram earlier this week showed Platner singing shirtless at a wedding where the skull tattoo, known as a Totenkopf or “death’s head,” is visible.
Platner told the magazine that he wasn’t aware of the tattoo’s background until recently, saying that he got it because “skull and crossbar motifs are popular amongst military units.” He said that his tattoo had been reviewed at a Military Entrance Processing Station when he later joined the U.S. Army, and before he began work as a contractor for the State Department.
Platner added that the wedding where he was singing was that of his sister-in-law, who is Jewish, and that several members of his extended family are Jewish.
“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,” Platner said.
Speaking to the Associated Press, Platner said that he chose to cover up the tattoo because a full removal would be a longer and more difficult process where he lives in rural Maine, and he “wanted this thing off my body.”
Platner is looking to unseat Republican senator Susan Collins, who has held her seat for 25 years despite shedding her once-moderate image in favor of the GOP’s ideological shift toward Donald Trump. While Collins has faced rising unpopularity in Maine, even being jeered and booed at a public appearance over the summer, Platner now has a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in Governor Janet Mills, who has the support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Platner burst onto the scene in August with a now-viral campaign launch video where he pledged to “topple the oligarchy that’s destroying our country” and end “endless wars,” and has appealed to to many voters in Maine by calling Israel’s massacre in Gaza a genocide and refusing to “take money from AIPAC or any group that supports the genocide in Gaza.” Now, his upstart candidacy faces the obstacle of convincing those voters that he isn’t hiding secret Nazi inclinations and is running for the right reasons.
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