Maine Senate Candidate Downplays SS Skull Tattoo: ‘I Am Not A Secret Nazi.’

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner addressed a tattoo on his chest that critics have slammed as being linked to Nazi imagery, as a flurry of controversial social media posts resurfaced.

In a Monday interview with “Pod Save America,” Platner encouraged the hosts to play a video of himself lip-syncing to Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” while shirtless at his brother’s wedding a decade ago. The video revealed that Platner has a tattoo of a black skull and crossbones on his chest. The design is known as the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head,” which was used as a symbol for the SS during the Nazi regime, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner told Pod Save America. “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 would say, lifelong opponent.”

Platner explained that he got the tattoo while on deployment as a Marine while “very inebriated” on leave in Croatia, and “we chose a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall” at the tattoo parlor.

“We got those and then we all moved on with our lives,” he added, saying that he was screened without issues when he later joined the Army, obtained security clearance, and worked as a State Department contractor without issue.

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“And I’ve also just lived my entire life like a regular person with a skull and crossbones on their chest,” he said, joking about the “Wrecking Ball” clip.

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

The tattoo received some negative responses from critics on social media, including on the Left.

“No skeletons in his closet, just an apparent Nazi logo on his chest,” MSNBC anchor Catherine Rampell posted to X.

“Gonna be hard to erase this one, literally and figuratively,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.

Platner is currently in a primary against Maine’s Democratic Governor, Janet Mills. The winner of that race will face incumbent Senator Susan Collins (R) in one of the most competitive races in the country. Various old Reddit posts of his resurfaced last week, including “I got older and became a communist.”

“The fact that I have managed to go from Communist to Nazi in the space of four days, according to the people who are trying to, whatever, do this to me, I find to be quite a spectacular turn of events,” Platner added in the podcast interview.

Other posts included him saying that, “Bastards. Cops are bastards. All of them, in fact.” The candidate has attempted to turn the tables on the news cycle, sharing other past Reddit posts condemning “misogyny and homophobia in the Marines,” he wrote in a recent X post.

Last week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee torched the posts from Platner.

“Graham Platner is a communist who supports violence against Republicans to promote his radical agenda. These posts are not just him messing around on the internet as he is trying to claim, they paint a very dark picture of a candidate not fit for office,” Samantha Cantrell, NRSC Regional Press Secretary, told The Daily Wire at the time.

The Daily Wire reached out to Platner’s campaign for comment.