Democratic candidate Graham Platner denies being ‘secret Nazi’ over tattoo

Maine Democratic Senate candidate and former Marine Graham Platner denied that he was a “secret Nazi” on Monday after revealing he has a tattoo that resembles a Nazi Germany symbol.

Platner’s campaign shared a video with the “Pod Save America” podcast that showed Platner lip-syncing to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” at his brother’s wedding about a decade ago. In the video, Platner is shirtless and appears to have a skull tattoo on his chest that resembles the “Totenkopf,” a symbol of the SS, or Schutzstaffel, under Adolf Hitler.

“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner said. “Actually, if you read through my Reddit comments, I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism and antisemitism and racism in general. I’d say a lifelong opponent.”

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Platner said that he got the tattoo in a Croatia parlor after being “very inebriated” with his fellow Marines in 2007. He insisted that skulls and crossbones were a “pretty standard military thing” and that he got the tattoo prior to joining the Army and getting a security clearance. 

“At no point in this entire experience of my life did anybody ever once say, ‘Hey, you’re a Nazi,'” Platner said. “It never came up until we got wind that in the opposition research, somebody was shopping the idea that I was a secret Nazi with a hidden Nazi tattoo. And I can honestly say that if I was trying to hide it, I’ve I’ve not been doing a very good job for the past 18 years.”

Platner quickly faced backlash for the video, including from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).

“This comes less than a week after he was caught: advocating for political violence, saying Black people don’t tip, calling all police ‘bastards,’ calling Maine’s lobstermen ‘pieces of sh*t.’ What’s next…,” the group wrote on X.

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Although Platner suggested he did not think the symbol meant anything beyond a skull and crossbones, his former political director Genevieve McDonald reportedly wrote on Facebook that he “knows damn well what it means.”

“This is seriously the dumbest timeline,” McDonald wrote. “Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest. He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff. Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”

She added, “The vault is open for the GOP to f—— crush any dreams we had in the general and literally everyone I know is fighting with each other on social media. We cannot be this painfully stupid.”

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Fox News Digital reached out to Platner’s campaign and the NRSC for comment.

Platner, who is attempting to take on longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, recently came under fire last week after Reddit posts of his from 2018 resurfaced. In one post, he wrote that “all” police are bastards and called himself a “communist.”

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In a separate post, he argued that if people “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history.”