The mad and bad Roman emperor, Caligula, made his horse a senator. So the scope for mad and bad political choices is wide. After winning the Democratic primary in Maine on Tuesday, essentially unopposed, Graham Platner is feeling his oats. And he might gallop all the way to the U.S. Senate in November, despite being manifestly unsuitable for the job. It would be a mad and bad decision by the Pine Tree State’s voters to send him there.
Some bad stuff about Platner has been well aired, so we can deal with it quickly here. He identifies with both Nazism and communism, frequents a sexual predator website, sexts women not his wife, has been denounced as a bully by past girlfriends, and has indulged a predilection for grotesque public vulgarity. But much still remains unknown about him that it would be good to find out. We don’t know what Platner said in his texts. Did women receive them willingly? How did they respond? How old — or young — were they? Was Platner a predator as well as a perv?
The fact that the candidate and his handlers are hiding these details is, by itself, bad enough. It’s a red flag and an alert to Mainers to stick with the five-term incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). She is a centrist if ever there was one, who has reflected her state accurately by being utterly unlike the MAGA extremist that Platner, with insouciant dishonesty, makes her out to be. He keeps defaming her as spineless and corrupt, which show chutzpah in a man with the character sketched above.
Susan Collins is spineless and corrupt.
And in 149 days, we will defeat her.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) June 7, 2026
The madness of picking Platner is of two types — angry mad, and crazy mad. Maine Democrats, like many others nationwide, are angry mad in the same way that Tea Partiers were angry mad after the 2008 global financial crisis. They are angry because they’re being economically squeezed. They find it hard to afford ordinary life. This is mostly the effects of rampant inflation unleashed by the leftists’ sock-puppet president, Joe Biden, although President Donald Trump’s tariffs are part of it. Still, they want to believe that blame really lies with inequality and malevolent billionaires. Democrat demagogues tell them this is so.
Platner has a gift for demagoguery. He is a protégé of Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who raged against “millionaires and billionaires” for decades until he accumulated millions himself, after which he dropped millionaires from his demonology and raged only against billionaires. The resentment of his wing of the party against the financial upper classes was expressed succinctly recently by another Bernie protégé, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who said, “you can’t earn a billion dollars.” Which means billionaires steal what isn’t theirs, taking it from honest workers.
Platner is of this rabble-rousing ilk. He drew cheers when he told Mainers last weekend, “If I had my way…if a billionaire looked at a TV ad the wrong way we’d put him in jail.” His audience laughed and lapped it up. It was indeed a joke, but it expressed the spirit of angry class warfare that animates today’s radical Left.
Eager to put people in jail for constitutionally protected activity. https://t.co/f0XwcbneI1
— Byron York (@ByronYork) June 8, 2026
Like Tea Partiers did in the Republican Party, the Sanders socialists are rapidly colonizing and utterly changing the Democratic Party. Its ostensible leaders are Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). But these members of the old guard retain only a few tattered shreds of the party’s respectable moderation. They are tired and scared and weak, and they are being dragged not very unwillingly to the Left by the Bernie wing, which is where the Left’s real energy is.
Sanders and his socialists were thwarted in their bid to take over the party in the 2020 presidential primary. But the last-minute intervention by the Democrat establishment, rescuing Biden, was only a temporary setback for the socialist radicals. They bounced back almost immediately and ran policy during the Biden presidency. Now they are wearing the Democratic Party like a skin suit. They hardly bother to hide it.
It’s convenient for their purposes to foster the flimsy fiction that the Democratic Party is the same one Americans have always known, but with a bit more energy and integrity. The truth is, however, that socialist such as Platner have taken it over and are manipulating the blue party. Various species of insect do the same thing; parasitoid wasps, for example, lay their eggs into living caterpillars, then eat their host from the inside while keeping it alive long after it has lost control of itself.
PLATNER VOWS NOT TO BE ‘A**HOLE’ LIKE FETTERMAN IF ELECTED TO SENATE
This is where the crazy mad aspect of choosing Platner comes in. He is part of the socialist fifth column that is determined to change America radically. It is not what the country wants nor what Mainers want, but voters are being played for suckers. Platner has no track record of public service, only of public disgrace. He was plucked off the street by Bernie operatives Daniel Moraff, Leanne Fan, and Morris Katz, who wield big New York money and who are constantly on the prowl for plausible con artists.
People used to say Donald Trump was a poor person’s idea of a rich person.
Graham Platner is a rich person’s idea of a poor person.
— James Kirchick (@jkirchick) June 6, 2026
These behind-the-scenes operators pushed Platner out into the floodlights to play the part of a regular, down-to-earth Democrat — “a rich person’s idea of what a poor person is,” as journalist Jamie Kirchick recently noted on X. Platner is their puppet, an invention, a Potemkin candidate. To pick this mirage of a man for the Senate would be crazy indeed.