Oops, I’ve Had a Nazi Tattoo for 18 Years

Will Democrats keep accepting a Senate candidate’s excuses?

Did you hear the one about the Bernie Sanders-backed Senate candidate with a Nazi SS emblem tattooed on his chest? Alas the case of Maine’s Graham Platner, a critic of Israel and its supporters, is no joke. So far Democrats have stood by him.

Maine Senatorial Candidate Graham Platner Speaks To Voters During Town Hall. (Getty Images)

“I am not a secret Nazi,” Mr. Platner said in an interview aired Monday night on the “Pod Save America” podcast hosted by Obama-era Democrats. Mr. Platner confirmed the tattoo, but he said he got it while drunk in Croatia in 2007 and didn’t know what it meant for some two decades. On Wednesday he said he finally had it “covered up” with a new image.

But an acquaintance of Mr. Platner told the Jewish Insider news site that the candidate explained the tattoo’s Nazi connection to him “in a cutesy little way” at a Capitol Hill bar in 2012. “He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf.’” That’s German for the “death’s head” symbol of the SS unit that ran the concentration camps.

Also not buying Mr. Platner’s excuse is his former political director, who resigned last week. “Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest. He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff,” she wrote Tuesday. “We cannot be this painfully stupid,” she wrote, referring to her fellow Democrats.

Oh yes, they can. On Tuesday Mr. Platner’s key supporter, Sen. Sanders, tried to duck the question. “What I’m worried about, 50,000 Americans may die unnecessarily? And you’re worried about a tattoo?” The online left is making support for Mr. Platner a purity test.

Mr. Platner was already brazening out CNN’s discovery last week of his social-media posts. “Cops are bastards. All of them,” he wrote in 2021. In reply to a 2020 post that said, “White people aren’t as racist or stupid as Trump thinks,” Mr. Platner replied, “Living in white rural America, I’m afraid to tell you they actually are.”

As with the pro-violence text messages of Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, Democrats have been forgiving of Mr. Platner’s comments. “I don’t think they’re disqualifying,” Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin said, “but certainly they’re not right, and I’m glad that he apologized for them.”

Democrats want to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) in 2026, and the party’s left has been rallying around Mr. Platner. Gov. Janet Mills, who joined the primary shortly before Mr. Platner’s posts surfaced in the press, is likeliest to benefit from the news.

Asked about Mr. Platner on Monday, California Rep. Ro Khanna said, “I don’t believe in the politics of personal destruction, especially in our own party.” We agree with Mr. Khanna about the politics of destruction, but that last clause gets it backward. Both sides have an obligation to police their own.