Why the ‘Nazi tattoo guy’ is winning in Maine | Will Bunch Newsletter

There’s a moment in the 1981 journalism thriller Absence of Malice (which I wrote last week about rewatching) in which Sally Field’s cursed reporter says of the story she’s covering, “There is no other story.” That’s pretty much how I feel about the rapidly declining mental state of the American president, but I can’t write the same column over and over. All I can do is quote the great bluesman Robert Cray: “Get him out, get him out, get him out!”

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The graveyard of American politics is littered with the corpses of longshot U.S. Senate campaigns with resumes that read a lot like that of Maine Democrat Graham Platner, a 41-year-old oyster farmer and U.S. Marine Iraq War veteran who’s never held major public office before. Especially when their primary opponent is someone like the state’s popular two-term governor, Janet Mills.

It would be a national story if a neophyte like Platner were running even close to the veteran Mills, who is backed by key members of the Democratic Party establishment, or if the polls gave him a chance of ousting the longtime GOP incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins, in November.

So what are we to think when Platner — an unabashed progressive backed by the likes of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — isn’t just ahead of the until-recently-better-known Mills, but crushing her by a nearly 30-point margin in the most recent polls? Or when those same surveys show Platner on track for defeating Collins as well?

And did I mention the Nazi tattoo? More on that later.

For starters, let’s talk about Platner’s popularity — across Maine, he draws overflow crowds at his frequent town halls in a state dominated by small coastal and rural communities — and the message that’s bringing so many people out.

“We will never get the future we deserve if we keep electing people who refuse to fight for it,” Platner told a large crowd in a school gym, as recorded by the Liberal Currents website. “In many ways, we just need a fundamental change in philosophy. We need to be able to dream big again, and we cannot accept when those in power tell us that that’s absurd. Because it isn’t. Because we’ve done this before, and we have to do it again.”

Platner’s prime message — that voters need a fighter — is exactly what many middle-class folks want to hear. That certainly includes battling the authoritarian excesses of Donald Trump — he’s proposed suspending the filibuster to pass the War Powers Act to restrain the president in Iran, for example — but his core policy agenda is economic populism, such as Medicare for All.

He often invokes stirring liberal moments from American history — the abolition of slavery, the Depression-era New Deal, or the 1960s civil rights movement — to inspire attendees to think of better things. Platner also stresses community building, telling his fans to not only vote but volunteer for local causes like food banks.

Politics is never a zero-sum game. Mills — his chief primary opponent, actively recruited by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — will turn 79 this year, which means she would be the oldest newly elected senator in U.S. history. Which seems to be exactly the reason she is not winning, with many Democrats saying that she’s been an excellent governor but symbolizes a Democratic Party that is too old and deeply out of touch. One voter, an older veteran who’d once knocked on doors for Mills in the past, told Liberal Currents he “just wants somebody new.”

But if you ever watched 60 Minutes back in its 20th century glory days, you know that this is where what starts out as a glowing political profile takes a 180-degree U-turn. While Mainers seem wowed by Platner in the moment, a predictable gaggle of elites — politicos, journalists, online commenters on the left-coded site Bluesky — can’t stop obsessing over the candidate’s past, which at times can get as murky as the frigid waters off Bar Harbor after a nor’easter.

Platner has had to explain, and/or apologize for, noxious online comments made more than a decade ago about women and rape, his online question about why (in his opinion) Black people are poor tippers, and also why after his Marine service, he worked briefly for the mercenary military contractor formerly known as Blackwater that is widely despised among Democratic voters.

But what’s been the biggest deal-breaker for Platner’s online critics has been the skull-and-crossbones chest tattoo that the candidate says happened when he and some Marine colleagues were on a bender while on leave in Croatia in 2007. Platner has acknowledged that the emblem was the Totenkopf, associated with Nazi units during World War II, and claimed he’d just recently learned this — which has been disputed in a couple of media reports — and as a result has now covered up the offending body ink.

Platner’s supporters, not surprisingly, do not see these things as automatically disqualifying. His younger backers, in particular, said his missteps remind them of dumb things they did when they were younger, in a world where everything goes online and stays there, no matter how embarrassing.

But we also live in a world where the last blue-collar-friendly Democrat who jazzed a rural electorate, Pennsylvania’s own Sen. John Fetterman, has now infuriated Democrats by voting too often with Trump while supporting immoral warfare in Gaza and Iran. You can understand why Platner makes some liberals nervous.

I’ve had Platner on my radar screen for a long time but have not written anything about him — mainly because I’ve struggled to know what to make of him. I totally get why some people find not just the Nazi tattoo thing, but his shifting stories, to be unforgivable.

But I do know this. Whatever his flaws, Platner has tapped into something that elites — especially the tired old hands of Democratic politics — cannot ignore, no matter how hard they try to cover their eyes. Maine is rebelling against the gerontocracy, against a cowed party’s focus-grouped-deer-in-the-headlights timidity, and against politicians who cater to the whims of billionaire donors.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s some of the same “forgotten American” anger, and desire for radical change, that fueled Trump when he ran the first time in 2016. Indeed, tapping into that deep reservoir of rage may be part of what the Democratic Party establishment fears about a newcomer like Platner.

The political theorist Alan Elrod told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent that “if we don’t take seriously some of these more underlying problems — that we are a deeply isolated and lonely and distrustful country that is focused on material well-being and status and is more dislocated and civically apathetic than maybe we’ve ever been — we’re going to get more Trumps, because that’s just fertile breeding ground for people like him."

Elrod’s not wrong about the grim mood of the electorate, but Trump’s second term has also exposed the 47th president — who, nearly 80, is even older than Maine’s Mills — as an old man who betrayed them on foreign wars and fixing the economy. That’s created an opening for a candidate like Platner who may not be politically correct — something that a lot of voters also liked about Trump — but unlike the political right is at least channeling the public’s anger at the privileged toward the correct direction.

If anything, the furor over the “Nazi tattoo” probably helps Platner in a weird way, as voters are rebelling against those despised elites trying to police what’s acceptable, and telling them whom they can vote for. He has only risen in the polls since the first report about the Totenkopf.

Any true revival for the Democratic Party — whose approval rating in the most recent CNN poll of 30% is even lower than the increasingly unhinged Trump — depends on its ability to convince its older leaders to gracefully retire, to embrace taxing the superwealthy and other policies that might offend the donor class, and to recruit more candidates who talk like Platner. Hopefully, some of them won’t even have tattoos.

Question: What message do you take from [Hungary’s Viktor] Orbán’s huge defeat? — Lisa Farrar (@lisafarrar.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Lisa, I’m glad you asked this, because the defeat of the Trump-backed strongman who ruled European Union member Hungary for 16 years is a huge story, but I don’t have a full column’s worth of deep thoughts on what it all means. I think people are trying a tad too hard to translate far off events into American terms. I would say this, however. U.S. Democrats seem deeply divided over whether to position candidates as anti-Trump or run in November on economic justice. Incoming prime minister Péter Magyar basically did both — centering his campaign on erasing Orbán yet also offering sweeping economic reforms. There’s no reason why American Dems can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

Last week’s question about whether the success of the Artemis II moon mission was a source of hope in troubled times drew the kind of response I expected: Small, but thoughtful. A few of you feel that America is too far gone from the kind of nation we were in 1968, when the very similar Apollo 8 odyssey did bring optimism. “Today Trump/MAGA foment hatred and distrust, the disparity of income and wealth is as large as during the Gilded Age, and the costs of middle class necessities (housing, healthcare, college education) are unaffordable,” offered the pessimistic frequent writer Daniel Hoffman. Stephen R. Rourke disagreed, arguing the NASA effort showed “the value of government in a democracy, even one on life support. It offers us a means by which we can work together.”

📮 This week’s question: Keeping with recent practice, I’d love to hear your thoughts about Maine’s Graham Platner, the subject of today’s main piece. Is his outspoken populism a breath of fresh air? Or do his past missteps like the Nazi tattoo make him a non-starter? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Graham Platner” in the subject line.

It was shocking yet also probably inevitable that the rising criticism by Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pontiff, about the immorality of Donald Trump’s authoritarian policies, and especially his war-of-choice in Iran, would cause the president to eventually lash out. Trump’s bizarre dead-of-Sunday-night Truth Social post — which attacked the Chicago native formerly known as Robert Prevost as “soft on crime,” as if he were a candidate in an Illinois Senate race — accused the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics of “catering to the radical Left.”

The war of words between the White House and the Vatican sparked a media frenzy, with a lot of it centered on angry or dismayed reaction from both prominent and rank-and-file Catholics. “I was so angry this morning,” the Rev. Paul Galetto of St. Paul’s Church in South Philadelphia told The Inquirer, as he called the president’s rant “childish.” Yet there is a place where a lot of Roman Catholic sons of urban enclaves like South Philly would completely disagree with the neighborhood priest.

That would be the world of talk radio.

Monday afternoon, I tuned into WPHT, the increasingly static-y voice of conservative talk in Greater Philadelphia at 1210 on the AM (what is this?) dial. Holding court, as he has for decades, was Dom Giordano, the 76-year-old son of 29th and McKean Streets and graduate of Bishop Neumann High and La Salle. I tune into his show, or other right-wing talkers, from time to time, to learn what the other half is saying, so I already knew this was a place where papal infallibility went out the window with the 2013 election of Leo’s also liberal predecessor, Pope Francis. Sure enough, Giordano did not disappoint.

“I think this” — meaning Trump’s war against Iran — “is the moral thing for the world now — to stop these maniacs,“ Giordano said during a lengthy tirade. ”They cannot have a nuclear weapon." The WPHT host lashed out at Leo as “a fraudulent Pope” who is supported by “fraudulent cardinals” — reflecting the views of millions of conservative U.S. Catholics that Leo, like Francis before him, is too obsessed with “woke” causes. And he found it ironic that “the media loves the Catholic Church now” since its leader has voiced criticism of Trump. (Giordano did think the president’s since-deleted “Jesus tweet” and calling Leo “soft on crime” was a bit much.)

It’s easy to forget in the current controversy that Trump won the Catholic vote with an estimated 55% in the 2024 election. In an America that’s increasingly less religious, native Catholics inclined to disagree with the church’s traditional social tenets like opposition to abortion or LGBTQ rights — not to mention its long-running sexual abuse scandals — have steadily drifted away. Increasingly, the “left behind” Catholics are more inclined to listen to shows like Giordano’s, vote for politicians like Trump, and see Leo as more apostate than apostle. In our modern Dark Ages, it sure sounds like another Great Schism.

Happy birthday! Today is the sixth anniversary of this newsletter, which was launched in the absolute darkest days of the COVID-19 crisis. (Indeed, my last-ever normal day of working in a newsroom included a planning meeting for the newsletter launch.) Not unexpectedly, the first edition dove into the only story that mattered that spring, with a look at how the forgotten, mostly Black residents of Louisiana’s refinery-laden “Cancer Alley” were dying from the virus at a faster rate than the media capital of New York City, which was getting all the attention. “The coronavirus is anything but an equal opportunity killer,” I wrote. “While the affluent flee to airy vacation homes, folks in Reserve, Louisiana, with their poisoned lungs are sitting ducks.” Read the rest: “Toxic air, racism and a virus: A deadly mix.”

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