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, and the disabled 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 still 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.
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