Todd Blanche already was facing opposition as attorney general nominee, but NY Times report shows he has been leading Trump's retaliation campaign

Confirmation hearings for attorney general nominee Todd Blanche are set for today and tomorrow, and when a vote is taken at a time to be determined, we will know if the United States has become a lawless, rogue state. We also will know if any Republican senators still have functioning spines. What are my guesses at the outcomes on these issues? They are grim. I suspect the rule of law, already on life support, will flatline when Blanche is confirmed as the nation's top law-enforcement official. As for Republican senators showing spine, I'm not counting on it.

How bad a nominee is Blanche? All you need to know is this: In private life, he was Trump's personal attorney -- and as acting attorney general upon the ouster of Pam Bondi -- he has proven that he still is acting as Trump's personal attorney. Is Blanche likely to act in line with his oath of office? Let's answer that question by looking at the oath he took when he became acting attorney general:

"I, Todd Blanche, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." 

Does that say Blanche is to act affirmatively on any Trump whim? No. Does it say Blanche is to prosecute any perceived political enemy Trump wants prosecuted? No. As for the last sentence in the oath, does Blanche even believe in God? In a religious sense, I'm sure Blanche would say, "Of course I believe in God." But in a political sense, Blanche has proven he is "all Trump, all the time" -- and he "shall put no other god above Trump." Blanche is the ultimate political loyalist, and that is the No. 1 trait (the only trait) Trump wants in any nominee. Will Blanche serve Trump? Yes, to the absolute hilt? Will he serve the duties of his job and the needs of the American people? Are you serious? They will be no consideration in any decision he makes. The White House essentially admitted as much in releasing the following statement about Blanche's nomination:

"President Trump has a great relationship with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and is very pleased with the job he’s doing so far. Todd Blanche is an American patriot who fearlessly fought against the Democrats’ unprecedented lawfare campaign on behalf of President Trump. The President’s entire team at the Department of Justice is doing a great job advocating for sanity, law and order, and policies that keep Americans safe."

Has an official statement ever contained that much mindless B.S. in one paragraph? I doubt it.

Blanche already looked like the worst AG candidate in U.S. history, but his look got even worse yesterday when The New York Times broke a story about emails that show Blanche is personally directing the effort to prosecute Trump's political enemies, apparently with no consideration for the constitutional standard of 'probable cause." A jointly published report at The Daily Beast and Yahoo! News examines the Times' findings under the headline "Emails reveal Todd Blanche spearheaded Trump's retribution campaign." Janna Brancolini writes:

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has been personally leading President Donald Trump's revenge campaign against his perceived enemies, according to a bombshell new report released in the lead-up to his Senate confirmation hearing.

Supporters of Blanche, who previously served as Trump's defense attorney, claim he has served as an important check on retribution crusades launched by the president's most provocative attack dogs, including the DOJ's Ed Martin and acting director of national intelligence Bill Pulte.

But just a day before Blanche's confirmation hearing to serve as Trump's permanent attorney general, The New York Times revealed that rather than being a calming influence on the administration, Blanche has been spearheading the president's retribution effort within the DOJ. 

That work began last year, when he served as his predecessor Pam Bondi's top deputy, and continued after Bondi's ousting in April, according to emails obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight and shared with The Times. 

How bad does Blanche look in all of this. The emails show that Blanche was compromised as a deputy AG and as acting AG. Does anyone seriously believe he is going to rediscover his respect for the rule of law once he becomes AG? Remember this guy is "all Trump, all the time," and that speaks volumes about who his master will be as head of the DOJ. Brancolini writes:

In particular, Blanche has been tasked with enacting Trump's executive order purporting to end the "weaponization" of the U.S. government, part of a major drive to punish members of prior administrations who tried to hold Trump legally accountable.

In May 2025, Blanche diverted top lawyers from his office to the DOJ "anti-weaponization" group responsible for investigating Trump's enemies, giving him tight control over the cases, the emails reveal.

One of Blanche's aides was responsible for digging into the actions of special counsel Jack Smith, who prosecuted Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents and attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Another longtime Blanche aide was assigned to investigate Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who secured convictions against Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records over his payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

A third Blanche aide led a team focused solely on Tina Peters, the Colorado elections clerk who served four years out of a nine-year sentence for violating state election laws in a bid to uncover "proof" of nonexistent fraud during the 2020 election. 

Here is a thought that seems to have never occurred to Blanche: Perhaps Trump (in the Stormy Daniels case) and his allies (Tina Peters in the Colorado voting case) ran afoul of the law because prosecutors made legitimate findings that laws had been violated, and Trump and Peters violated them. Brancolini writes:

Blanche also allowed Martin to personally oversee investigations into two of Trump's pet causes: the prosecutions of more than 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters—some of whom Martin had represented in court—and a probe into former President Joe Biden's autopen use.

But in May, Blanche removed Martin from his role with the anti-weaponization group. He had been concerned all along that Martin wasn't experienced or effective enough to do the job, the emails—which were handed over under the Freedom of Information Act—reveal.

Since then, the anti-weaponization group has ramped up its investigations and reports, even as regional U.S. attorneys' offices have begun trying to build a massive yet flimsy conspiracy case against Biden and other Trump adversaries, The Times reported.

Last week, a group of 1,205 Justice Department alums urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Blanche's nomination, writing that "corruption and abuses… have defined" his tenure, and that he has "degraded" the DOJ's apolitical career workforce. 

Will senators listen? With Democrats, I suspect the answer is yes. They should be smart enough to know that Blanche is the quintessential Trump loyalist, and it's hard to imagine what any Dem might think he or she could gain by supporting Blanche. As for Republicans, they have proven they cannot govern -- and have little interest in governing -- so they are inclined to do whatever Trump wants. And Trump wants an AG he can fully control -- and that person is Todd Blanche. It's possible a handful of Republicans might display a conscience and vote no on Blanche. But I don't expect many to go that route.

Transgender author/actress says that in her previous life as a male, Lindsey Graham forked over a "fat stash of cash" for her to do "unspeakable things" to him

Jesse James Rose (Instagram)

A transgender author and actress reveals in an Instagram post that, in her previous life as a male, the late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) paid her a "fat stash of cash" to do "unspeakable things" to him, according to a report at The Advocate, which is billed as the world's premier site for news about the LGBT community.

Jesse James Rose tells her story to Guispe Lopez, lifestyle and health writer for The Advocate and its sibling publication them.us. Lopez writes:

After longtime U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham died on Saturday night, reportedly from aortic dissection, the reaction from the LGBTQ+ community was immediate.

Indeed, some young queer people weren’t made aware of the senator’s death via a push notification from a publication. Instead, a now-viral Instagram post from trans author and actress Jesse James Rose, in which she details an alleged experience of being paid by Graham for sex work prior to her gender transition, while she attended college, ended up inadvertently being the way many found out about the politician’s passing. The author attended New York University and holds a degree in Music Theatre and Child & Adolescent Mental Health Studies, according to her bio. Them has reached out to Rose for comment, and to Graham’s Senate office separately.

Graham died unexpectedly on Saturday evening (7/11/26), and Rose woke up, apparently the next morning, and quickly realized she knew this man in the headlines in a much different way than was being presented in news accounts -- although many who follow politics closely had long suspected there was another side to Graham that he had steadfastly denied through the years. Rose promptly got her story out to the public, suggesting Graham skeptics had been on the correct trail all along. Lopez gets right to the heart of her story:

“Just woke up to find out Lindsey Graham is dead. lol??? Most of you know him as the homophobic Senator from South Carolina but to me he will always be the man who paid a twinky pre-transition college student a fat stack of cash to do unspeakable things to him in a hotel room while he wore red lingerie,” the Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex author wrote in the three-slide post, accompanied by a hand raising emoji. “It is a canon trans event to have far right freaks bankrolling you & then turning around and voting against you.”

“People loooooove to judge us for it but I never see them opening their wallets!!! Shout out to s*x workers everywhere forced to humanize their enemies just to make rent,” she continued. “It is an absolute mindfvck too me that one of the reasons I have any semblance of financial security (& a lack of student loans) is because of this man.”

When Rose first encountered Graham in her previous life as a male, she did not connect him to Congress or any other position of renown, but it quickly became clear that he had access to large sums of cash and was willing to part with some of it in exchange for his/her ability to perform . . . well, "unspeakable acts." Lopez picks up the story from there, quoting Rose:

“At the time I had no idea who he was, and I only figured it out because another group of  twinks leaked Lady G to the media,” Rose continued. “Some queer tried to grandstand critique this, saying we shouldn’t ‘out’ people. I believe bigots with power deserve no peace or privacy, especially when they hold public office. I’m glad they did it. Icons forever.”

Lopez notes that rumors regarding his sexuality had followed Graham for years. But the senator had always denied them, usually in a fairly calm manner. Perhaps he knew the side of him that Rose had seen would not play well to the conservative electorate in South Carolina. Lopez writes:

Graham consistently denied being gay until the end of his life. When comedian Chelsea Handler made insinuations about his sexuality online in 2018, the Senator responded to the allegations, saying, “To the extent that it matters, I’m not gay.”

However, while Rose’s recent post following Graham’s death is one of the most direct instances of a queer person alleging that Graham had hired them for sex work, it isn’t the first. In 2020, porn performer Sean Harding posted online, implying that an unnamed Republican senator had hired multiple gay sex workers, including him. People connected the story to Graham based on the nickname “Lady G,” a code name sex workers in D.C. allegedly used to refer to the South Carolina legislator. The nickname followed Graham for what would turn out to be the final years of his life.

As recently as 2025, right-wing influencer and Trump ally Laura Loomer said that Graham was gay while testifying under oath for a deposition. “Several of President Trump’s staff have told me in confidence that Lindsey Graham is gay,” Loomer said during the deposition, which she later defended online, saying she did not want to perjure herself.  

Dealing with rumors about his sexuality did not keep Graham from maintaining a solid right-wing stance on policy matters that might impact the LGBT community. Lopez writes:

Despite these rumors, Graham maintained his anti-LGBTQ+ policy stances for the entirety of his political career. Additionally, he also aided in the creation and passage of SESTA/FOSTA, a set of laws passed under the Trump administration that attacked online sex work under the guise of fighting trafficking, while allegedly making the industry more dangerous for sex workers. Graham also sponsored the EARN IT Act in 2020, which further targeted online sex work.

“Lindsey, rest in hell for what you did to our community,” Rose’s post concluded. “I will continue to love queer and trans people harder than you ever hated us. You loved every second of our time together and now everyone knows.”

Many commenters thanked Rose for her vulnerability in calling out the perceived political hypocrisy of opposing LGBTQ+ and sex workers’ rights while allegedly leading a secret double life. Among the high-profile voices of support were actor Alyson Stoner, fellow author Max Delsohn, actress and Gaydar host Anania, and musician Ezra Deran Michel.

After MAGA conspiracy theories involving Russia and Iran flooded social media, preliminary medical report links Lindsey Graham's death to tear in the aorta wall

(WJCL News, Facebook)

Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of Donald Trump's  staunchest supporters, likely died over the weekend from a tear in his aorta, according to a preliminary medical-examiner finding. The tear in the inner wall of the aorta is called an aortic dissection and likely was related to the hardening of Graham's arteries. An official cause of death will be disclosed after toxicological and microscopic testing.

The report came after social media was inundated much of Sunday by rumors, mostly spread by Trump's MAGA supporters, that Russian operatives (apparently tied to Vladimir Putin) had poisoned Graham during or after a recent trip to Ukraine because of the senator's support for new, tough sanctions against Russia. This is from a report at Raw Story under the headline "'Get your tinfoil; MAGA chases 'conspiracy' clicks hours after Lindsey Graham's death":

Just hours after the 'sudden' death of Sen. Lindsey Graham was announced to the public, MAGA conspiracy theorists began chasing traffic with wild claims about the cause.

Questions do remain after Graham's office released a statement Sunday morning that was short on detail.

"On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to release more information after declaring on Truth Social Sunday morning that Graham "is dead!"

It was later revealed he died Saturday night at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. after reportedly suffering chest pains. "Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness," read the 2 a.m. statement. "Senator Graham's family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period."

These sparse details proved fodder enough for conspiracy theories to thrive on X. 

 Libertarian talk show host Clint Russell told his nearly 300,000 followers to "get your tinfoil ready" before he suggested, without evidence, that Russia was somehow to blame for Graham's death in Washington, D.C.

Graham was in Ukraine as recently as Friday for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, reports show.

"I'd say there is a decent chance that Russia blew up Lindsey Graham," Russell wrote in a comment liked more than a thousand times.

"Graham is not just the most psychotic booster of Ukraine but he was also the biggest booster for arming Ukraine a decade ago (and likely the Maidan revolution) which really forced Russia to invade," Russell added. "This -could- be the warning shot to the political class that while Russia doesn't want WW3 they will extract a cost on the politicians themselves who are pushing for this endless war. It's now being reported he died of a heart attack. Sure, maybe. Idk."

MAGA influencer Laura Loomer also blamed Russia but she decided to tell her 1.9 million followers, again without evidence, that it was possible Russia had poisoned Graham with help from Iran. "There seriously needs to be an investigation," she wrote in a post liked nearly 10,000 times. "Russia just sent a delegation to Khamenei’s funeral in Tehran where the IRGC and funeral organizers was calling for myself, President Trump and Senator Graham to be assassinated. Lindsey Graham was in Ukraine one day ago calling for a Russian sanctions bill that he claimed the White House supports. Now he is suddenly dead from a random illness according to his staff. Did Russia just murder a US Senator?"

Will release of the preliminary medical report cause the conspiracy theories to die down? Probably not. But The Hill provides details about the early official findings under the headline "Preliminary findings refveal Graham died of 'aortic dissection': Medical examiner":

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) died on Saturday of an aortic dissection due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, the office of the Washington, D.C., chief medical examiner said Sunday.

“The death certificate will be PENDING until all the toxicological and microscopic testing are finalized and at that point the death certificate will be updated to reflect the cause of death and appropriately classify the manner of death,” noted the office of Dr. Francisco Diaz, the chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia.

In a joint statement, Diaz’s office and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department noted comprehensive toxicological and microscopic testing, the former of which will determine whether any substances were in Graham’s system, will “take time to complete.”

Emergency medical services (EMS) personnel responded to a call for “cardiac arrest” at Graham’s home in Capitol Hill on Saturday night, according to scanner audio obtained by NBC News. EMS personnel on the scene later administered CPR, according to audio.

Photographs from the scene obtained by NBC News showed paramedics carrying a person on a stretcher from Graham’s house to an ambulance, with police cars and fire trucks also on site.

While the Senate was on recess this past week, Graham traveled to Ukraine amid Russia’s continued invasion of its neighbor to the west. While there, the South Carolina Republican met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.

President Trump said Sunday he spoke to Graham on Saturday evening, shortly after the four-term senator returned to D.C. from Ukraine.

“He sounded a little tired, but perfect. But a little bit tired, he had a right to be,” Trump told host Kristen Welker on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”  

An aortic dissection is when a tear occurs in the inner layer of the body’s main artery, the aorta, according to the Mayo Clinic. Once blood rushes through the tear, the inner and middle layers of the artery will split, with the dissection often deadly if blood goes outside the artery.

The Mayo Clinic noted aortic dissections, while not common, typically occur to men in their 60s and 70s. Symptoms of aortic dissections include sudden severe chest or upper back pain that spreads to the neck or back, sudden severe stomach pain or loss of consciousness.

Cardiovascular disease, a group of diseases impacting the heart and blood vessels, is the leading cause of death worldwide and in the U.S. as of 2022, according to the Cleveland Clinic. 

Those with a family history of heart disease are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, the latter clinic noted. Graham’s father, Florence Graham, died of a heart attack at the age of 68. 

Platner's exit speech suggests the "establishment" and Democratic Socialists under Bernie Sanders' sway might never be able to live happily under one roof

When word came Wednesday that Graham Platner was set to leave the U.S. Senate race in Maine, Democratic officials reportedly were hoping he would exit quietly. allowing the party to choose a replacement and move forward with a sense of unity. Platner, however, had other ideas. The Washington Post described his exit statement, provided via video, as "bitter" and "defiant." Other news outlets used similar language, with words such as "grace" and "apologetic" nowhere to be found. That's because Platner, in so many words, blamed the Democratic Party -- not his own graceless behavior -- for a campaign that went from promising to imploding.

Julie Roginsky, a Democratic Party strategist who has been a contributing writer at Fox News and CNBC, picked up on that theme at her Salty Politics newsletter on Substack. Under the headline "The one person Platner didn't trash on his way out the door; plus he hasn't actually dropped out," Roginsky writes:

Graham Platner suspended his race for the United States Senate Wednesday night and somehow managed to make his withdrawal even more damning than his candidacy.

As of [Thursday] morning, there is no confirmation that Platner has formally filed the paperwork necessary to get off the ballot. He can hold the party hostage to his whims until the last minute. He can, if he is angry enough, just keep his name on the ballot and prevent anyone else from running altogether. His "suspension”speech is reason enough to believe that he will take it down to the wire.

Based on my social-media feeds, many Americans are acutely aware that, with Donald Trump in the White House, we are essentially hostages for a president who shows many traits of narcissism. As we have reported here at the Legal Schnauzer blog, former Johns Hopkins psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor John Gartner has been one of the most astute and outspoken observers of Trump's behavior, labeling it in stark and concerning terms. Gartner also is the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, an organization working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump. Gartner has stated:

Trump is a malignant narcissist. Erich Fromm, the noted psychoanalyst who studied Nazi Germany — and the person who introduced the diagnosis of “narcissism” — explained that in such personalities their grandiosity, their narcissism, their paranoia, conspiracy theories, sociopathy, criminal behavior and sadism all go into overdrive when they get power. Those traits are also inflamed when a narcissist is challenged or attacked.

And there is a feedback loop as well, where because they’re gaining power — which inflames their narcissism and their paranoia and their freedom to act on their criminal impulses — of course that means there will be opposition and resistance to them. Narcissists like Donald Trump then demonize and try to brutalize and invalidate anyone who does not kiss his ring. Trump has systematically eliminated every single guardrail on his power and behavior in the White House.

Donald Trump, it turns out, might not be the only person with narcissistic traits who has been making political headlines. Consider Julie Roginsky's take on Graham Platner's exit speech.

For eleven minutes, Platner talked about himself, about what had been done to him, about the campaign he built, about the movement he led, and about the victory he won. Most prevalently, he talked about the sinister forces he believes took it all away.

“They are not going to let us have it,” he said furiously, practically through tears.

Who, exactly, is “they”?

Chuck Schumer? The Maine Democratic Party? AIPAC? Platner never really said. “They” are always more useful when they remain amorphous. “They” can be whoever his supporters already hate.

But there was one name conspicuously absent from Platner’s self-pitying farewell: Susan Collins.

That omission made this a case of what Platner did NOT say being more revealing than what he DID say. Roginsky writes:

Platner did not use his moment to tell his supporters that the most important thing now is defeating the Republican senator he supposedly entered this race to defeat. He did not tell them to rally behind the next Democratic nominee. He did not say that Medicare for All, economic justice, workers’ rights or ending endless wars hinge on first beating Collins.

Instead, after a campaign that had already been consumed by one scandal after another, Platner used his exit to attack the party that must now clean up his mess. “The ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment,” he declared, after complaining that “they” would not let his movement “have” the victory it had earned. 

Much of the controversy surrounding Platner's campaign centers on accusations that he has been an abuser of women. The language of his suspension speech seemed to carry the tone of an abuser, Roginsky writes:

My friend Michelle Kinney noted last night that there is a familiar ring to this if you have crossed paths with an abuser: If I cannot have you, no one will. Or, in this case: If Graham Platner cannot have this Senate seat, then the party he claimed to care about can’t either. That’s why he refused to mention Collins’ name.

Platner’s selfishness did not begin with his withdrawal. It began with his decision to run in the first place, despite having been present for every moment of his own life and knowing exactly how he had spent it. What was appalling is that he used PTSD and alcoholism as the absolution for all his bad behavior. More appalling is how many otherwise smart people excused his vile screeds against women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ communities, the disabled (and rural Mainers) for the same reason.

Roginsky raises this question: Is Graham Platner profoundly lacking in self-awareness, perhaps to the point that he has no business attempting to serve in public office? Or maybe he was aware of his transgressions and chose to cover them up. Here is more from Roginsky on that subject:

Really, friends, it’s OK to hold a politician accountable for being a scumbag, even if he was drunk when he behaved poorly. Alcoholism is a disease that deserves grace, but it does not entitle anyone to run in a swing state against an entrenched incumbent. Besides, was he also drunk every time he swore up and down this year that there were no more skeletons in his closet, only for another cadaver to fall out the next moment?

Candidates know what is in their own pasts. Platner knew before he asked Maine Democrats to make him their nominee that there were reams of material waiting to come out. First came the offensive Reddit posts, then the tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. There were reports that he had sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women early in his marriage, then allegations from former partners about disturbing and violent behavior. Finally came allegations of sexual assault and nonconsensual condom removal, all of which Platner has denied.

At every stage, Democrats were told that this was the last shoe. By the end, one had to wonder whether there was a DSW left in Maine with any inventory. 

Some have called the Platner candidacy an "insurgency," supposedly against the "establishment" but possibly against the Democratic Party. At a campaign rally in May 2026, Platner declared that he was running under the banner of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and he shared the stage with the most famous DSAer of all, Bernie Sanders. 

DSA candidates have been on a primary winning streak in 2026, but their vanquished foes have mostly been mainstream Democrats. Could that cause a rift within the Democratic Party? Are Democratic Socialists capable of taking down large numbers of Republicans in general elections? Is their aim to take down Trump or could they wind up helping to keep Trumpers in power? As Roginsky notes, DSA candidates have not reacted well to those who voiced concerns the insurgents might hurt the Democratic Party more than help it:

The people who raised alarms were scolded for focusing on gossip. They were accused of doing the establishment’s dirty work. When the reports about Platner’s messages to women surfaced just before the June 9 primary, Bernie Sanders brushed them aside. “I think it’s important for us to focus on the issues facing working families a little bit more than Graham Platner’s marriage,” Sanders said.

But that was precisely the problem. This was never merely about Platner’s marriage. It was about whether a candidate seeking one of the most consequential Senate seats in America had been candid with voters about the volume of damaging material in his past — and whether the people promoting him had done even the most elementary work of figuring out whom they were selling.

Roginsky is quick to say that Sanders and other DSA candidates have quite a few solid policy ideas. But that, she says, is only part of the equation:

For the record, I agree with Sanders on a lot of policy prescriptions. I want Medicare for All. I want billionaires to pay their fair share and workers to have more power. I agree wholeheartedly that the Democratic establishment has utterly failed in meeting this moment.

But the way you achieve those things is by electing people who can win. The way you defeat Collins is by nominating someone capable of surviving a general election. The way you build lasting progressive power is not by slapping the correct policy positions onto a defective product and then accusing everyone who notices the defects of serving the oligarchy. Doing this is the political equivalent of consumer fraud.

The Sanders movement and the broader DSA political ecosystem keep insisting that ideology is the ultimate test of political virtue. Say the right things about billionaires, Gaza, health care, and war and every question about character or electability becomes a plot by “the establishment.” Then the candidate implodes and suddenly the people who sounded the alarm are expected to help clean up the blast radius while Sanders takes 24 hours to get around to kinda-sorta conceding that maybe it’s time for Platner to reconsider his candidacy. 

In the end, this might be a case of one movement and one party who cannot live happily under one roof. So what gives? No one seems to know at the moment, but Roginsky has serious thoughts on the matter, focusing especially on the delusions and shortcomings of the DSA movement:

The culture that made Platner possible is motivated by one key attribute: a political world in which hostility to the Democratic Party is often treated as a more important credential than the ability to help Democrats win power. Those of us who don’t fall in line with deeply problematic candidates who denigrate women and people of color (you know, the groups who are actually the backbone of the Democratic Party) are considered sell-outs because we allegedly care too much about the “establishment” and not enough about the “working man.”

This may come as a surprise to Daniel Moraff, the Brown University and Yale Law School graduate and self-proclaimed Bernie Sanders “supevolunteer” who recruited Platner to run: successful campaigns vet their candidates before unleashing them on voters. Moraff has failed to do this repeatedly — not when he worked for a candidate in Pittsburgh who it turned out belonged to a church with anti-gay views (he lost); not when he worked for a candidate in New York who it turned out beat her son with a belt (she lost); not when he worked for a candidate in Iowa whom he never bothered to properly vet (he lost too). In Maine, Moraff also failed to properly vet Platner.

No matter, because Moraff had the secret weapon that turns many a young DSA man hard: he got his mentor Sanders to endorse Platner just days after Platner entered the race. Sanders, in turn, helped make Platner into a national progressive star and publicly discouraged Governor Janet Mills from entering the primary. Platner became a vehicle for the Sanders wing’s longstanding project of proving that the Democratic establishment was weak, corrupt, and ideologically bankrupt. (It is here that I note, again, that Sanders cannot even be bothered to join the party he has spent decades trying to conquer.)

In simple terms, it might come down to this: Will Sanders and his acolytes wind up being about selflessness or selfishness? Roginsky provides clues for political observers to pick up on:

Having gotten us into this mess with their self-righteous bullshit, here is the test for Sanders and his ilk now: If Platner actually files the paperwork to drop out, Maine Democrats will choose a replacement by July 27. That person may well be a member of the DSA — or not. Does it really matter? Whoever it is will be miles better than Susan Collins.

So count the times Bernie Sanders comes over from Vermont to campaign for the eventual nominee. Count the rallies, the fundraising emails, the breathless speeches about the moral imperative of defeating Susan Collins. My prediction: one check-the-box rally at best, unless the nominee pledges sufficient devotion to Sanders and his political project.

If this were really about achieving Medicare for All and not just using it as a plot device to wrest power from the establishment, Sanders and his allies would have found another candidate the moment the first, second, and third Platner shoes began falling. If this were really about billionaires, they would have protected the chance to flip this crucial Senate seat. If this were really about ending wars, workers, health care and working families, Platner would have ended his campaign by saying the most important words he somehow never managed to say: “If you believed in my candidacy because you agreed with my message, you have to support the eventual Democratic nominee and defeat Susan Collins.” 

He did not, because in the end, his withdrawal revealed the ugliest truth about his candidacy: Graham Platner was not a man serving a movement. The movement was serving Graham Platner.