PORTLAND, MAINE – MAY 1: U.S. Senate candidate from Maine Graham Platner during a campaign event with the Maine AFL-CIO, on May 1, 2026 in Portland, Maine. Platner, an oyster farmer by trade, is now the presumptive Democratic nominee before the Maine Primary election in June, after his chief rival Maine Governor Janet Mills (not-pictured) recently suspended her campaign. (Photo by Graeme Sloan/Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders July 8, 2026 at 8:55am
With every passing day, it gets clearer that Graham Platner is the kind of lowlife Democrats wanted Pete Hegseth to be.
The man Democrats nominated for the U.S. Senate in Maine — a nomination he still held as of Wednesday morning — has been revealed repeatedly to be an abuser of women and alcohol, an alleged rapist with a violent streak that would make a wife beater blush.
And now, according to a bombshell report Wednesday in The Washington Post, he repeatedly removed condoms during sex with a former girlfriend — and tried to keep her from knowing about it.
“He would pull condoms off,” Lyndsey Fifield, the former girlfriend, told the newspaper. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.”
And he did it on at least half a dozen occasions, Fifield said, even knowing that she wasn’t on birth control.
Now, the story raises an obvious question about Fifield’s choice in men. After all, accidents happen. Anything can go wrong at any particular time in any field of human activity.
Which would be more appropriate for Platner: serious counseling or prison?
But when a guy engages in behavior that can lead to pregnancy — secretly betraying his sexual partner during literally the most intimate moments of a relationship — it’s a different matter. When a guy does it more than say, once, more than twice, more than five times, it becomes a legitimate question of just how intelligently the woman in question is really approaching the whole situation.
It’s true that Charlie Brown keeps trying to keep kicking the football that Lucy keeps moving. But it’s also true that Charlie Brown is a cartoon character.
But put that aside for a minute and consider what this kind of move — assuming it’s true — says about Platner’s character, and about the Democratic Party.
He clearly has zero respect for women (and especially not for one particularly gullible, or forgiving, woman). He has zero respect for the potential consequences of his behavior. (Even if Platner wanted offspring, most normal men understand that tricking an unsuspecting partner into an unwanted pregnancy is not the way to go about it.)
Those are the kind of smears on now-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Democrats wanted Americans to believe during his confirmation process.
They claimed Hegseth’s Christian-themed tattoo pointed to Nazi sympathies, while downplaying Platner’s literal Nazi tattoo.
They attacked Hegseth’s for alleged past abuses of alcohol and women — Platner has that in spades, although the rape allegation reported Monday by Politico is by far the most serious.
And now comes a woman with an accusation that involves behavior so repulsive that even liberal stomachs should turn. And Democratic operatives are probably kicking themselves now that they couldn’t come up with a way to try to convince the American people that Hegseth had done it to some woman, somewhere, back in a day so foggy that no one can prove that it never actually happened.
And we’re back to the Charlie Brown-football question and Democratic voters.
The Platner revelations and allegations — and there are almost certainly going to be more, regardless of whether he remains in or leaves the Senate race — only prove what’s become a timeless truth about American politics:
Liberals are loudest in accusing the right when they’re guilty of the same behavior themselves.
Just like Biden’s crime family — grifting on a global scale — was the very picture of what leftists imagined of the Trump family life, Platner’s sordid personal life is made up of the kind of terrors Democrats tried to claim Pete Hegseth is guilty of.
Their biggest problem, as always, is the matter of truth.
Now they’re stuck with a candidate in a crucial Senate campaign whom the party doesn’t want, and that the voters of Maine almost certainly won’t elect if he stays in the race.
What happens next in the ongoing saga of Graham Platner is anyone’s guess at this point.
A better question is when sane, responsible Americans who consider themselves Democrats (there are millions and millions out there) are going to see the modern incarnation of the party for the fraud that it is.
Like Charlie Brown in the cartoon panel, like the woman in Platner’s bed, they’ve got to ask themselves: How long are they going to keep falling for it?
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