A Nazi Tattoo Exposes Democrats’ Greatest Weakness

All you have to do is take a passing glance at Graham Platner, a progressive candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine, to understand why so many Democrats have been frothing at the mouth over his candidacy for months. His beefy tattooed arms and weathered face made him look like a live-action Popeye. He’s often styled in a dirty ball cap and ragged T-shirt, implying a sort of everyman machismo.

It’s the kind of look that suggests Platner could be the Democratic Party’s new great white hope — a working-class white man who can speak to class antagonism in an economically unequal electorate.

There’s just one teensy-weensy problem. It turns out that friend-of-the-white-working-class had a Nazi tattoo.

The tattoo resembles a Totenkopf, a well-known symbol of official Nazis, the Nazi-adjacent and people who just think that Nazi iconography is tough. The gist is that Platner got the tattoo in 2007 in Croatia when he was on leave with his fellow Marines. Platner has said that he didn’t know the symbol’s semiotics. He only knew that Marines get “terrifying-looking” tattoos.

(It’s worth stating that Platner’s former political director has questioned his claim of ignorance. The campaign said the director’s allegation was a “a lie from a disgruntled former employee.”)

Platner’s campaign has been busy handling the fallout from the tattoo and his Reddit comment history, which was sometimes racist, misogynistic and homophobic and sometimes antifascist and antiracist. It’s the kind of messiness the internet inculcates. No one with a social media history is pure. After 18 years sporting what may or may not have been a symbol of the SS, Platner announced last week that he had the tattoo covered up. We are far enough away from his Democratic primary next June that all this should end up as just another weird little political story in an extraordinary political moment in American history.