Maine is small: O’Connell put me in touch with a childhood friend, Jesse Einhorn, whose parents turn out to know Platner’s. He wants to speak with people who know Graham personally before making any decisions. “I’m keeping my mind open though, because I think that none of it is objectively disqualifying,” Einhorn says. “And look, I’m Jewish, so I am kind of hypersensitive to all these things.” He’s on the same page as his father, David Einhorn—a retired lawyer who practiced in Ellsworth and used to play tennis with Platner’s father. “I think a lot of people would not recognize skull and crossbones as associated with the Nazis,” says the elder Einhorn. “It’s a tattoo. I don’t think it’s significant.”
Below, Platner describes how he covered up the tattoo, his thoughts on where the oppo research against him is coming from, and what he’d rather be talking about instead.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Vanity Fair: Your former political director has described you as a military history buff, and said that you now know what your tattoo means—even if you didn’t when you got the tattoo. At what point exactly did you realize what the symbol means?
Graham Platner: Oh, when this all came out.
Who told you what it means?
Even last week, a few weeks ago, somebody asked me if I had a white supremacist tattoo and I laughed at them. I thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard.
When you say someone—someone from the media? Someone from your campaign?
Someone—[it] would’ve been a question if I had a white supremacist tattoo. And I said, of course not. That’s insane, because I’m not now nor ever have been anyone that. In fact, I’ve lived a life dedicated against antisemitism. This is a core of who I am as a person, which, I will say, makes all of this essentially doubly insulting. But then late last week, someone reached out to the campaign—I forget from what news outlet—saying there was this story that I have some kind of white supremacist slash hate tattoo. I want to make this clear: I joined the United States Army with this tattoo. I went to MEPS [a Military Entrance Processing Station]. When you join the service, you get checked for gang and hate tattoos. I went to work for the State Department as a contractor with a full physical, which does the exact same thing. I have had this tattoo for 18 years. My sister-in-law is Jewish, and so is my extended family.
