Maine Senate candidate comes under fire for Nazi-style tattoo
Graham Platner, a Democrat, insisted his black skull-and-crossbones tattoo doesn’t reflect positive views toward Nazism
Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner. Courtesy of Graham for Maine
By Jacob Kornbluh October 21, 2025
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A Democrat running for the Senate in Maine is facing backlash after acknowledging that a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest resembles a Nazi symbol.
Graham Platner, a 41-year-old Marine veteran and oyster farmer, confirmed the tattoo’s existence on Monday, in an effort to get ahead of rumors sparked by an opposition research group after Platner was seen on video singing shirtless at his brother’s wedding.
“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner said on the Pod Save America podcast, claiming to instead be “a lifelong opponent” of Nazism and antisemitism. Platner said he got the tattoo in 2007 while stationed in Croatia with fellow Marines.
“We picked a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall,” he said, implying he was unaware of any specific historic implications to the symbol. “It was a standard military thing.”
But a former acquaintance who knew Platner while attending George Washington University more than a decade ago told Jewish Insider that Platner himself identified the tattoo as a “Totenkopf,” the death’s head emblem used by a Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps during World War II. That acquaintance said Platner used the term during a 2012 conversation at a Capitol Hill bar where he then worked and socialized.
Platner insisted that he wasn’t aware the tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol until reporters began to recently ask him about it. “I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that, and to insinuate that I did is disgusting,” he said in a statement to Jewish Insider. “I am already planning to get this removed.”
However, his former political director, Genevieve McDonald, who resigned from his campaign last week, wrote in a Facebook post that she thought the candidate knew about the “antisemitic tattoo on his chest” before rumors began. “Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it,” she added, “but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”
McDonald resigned after Reddit posts surfaced in which Platner made incendiary comments, including by defending a man with a Nazi SS lightning bolt tattoo who impersonated a federal officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas in 2020.
Platner is competing in a 10-person race against the longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, and is backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Independent from neighboring Vermont.
Platner, who described himself as a “working-class populist,” enlisted in the Marines in 2003 and served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He later returned to Kabul for six months as a State Department security contractor with Constellis.
After that experience, he became outspoken in his criticism of United States defense spending, arguing that it served as “a mechanism for transferring taxpayer dollars into the private bank accounts of defense companies.” He said that his experience overseas “uniquely prepares him to fight back against the broken and corrupt foreign policy that consumes Washington.”
The candidate is also a strident critic of Israel. “There is a genocide happening in Palestine,” he wrote on X in August. Marking the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Platner wrote that the war in Gaza was “the moral test of our time” and said he is “committed to ending this U.S.-funded genocide in Palestine.” He also ran Facebook ads rejecting AIPAC.
His chief Democratic rival is Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who was endorsed on Tuesday by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
