It’s not me, it’s them: Platner goes down snarling with graceless exit video

These were the parting words of Richard Nixon after he was forced to resign the presidency over the Watergate imbroglio in 1974. For Graham Platner on Wednesday, the stakes were somewhat smaller. But when it came to suspending his Senate campaign in Maine, the Democrat had plenty of hate to go around.

The scandal-plagued Platner was forced to step down after a woman who dated him said he drunkenly forced her to have sex despite her telling him to stop, an allegation he denies. It spelled doom for an insurgent campaign that had begun 323 days earlier with a glossy horizontal video that showed Platner farming oysters, chopping wood and gruffly talking about “hardscrabble” folk in Maine.

On Wednesday the video was vertical and, according to the Politico news site, recorded at 4pm outside Platner’s home in Maine in the company of aides including Ben Chin and Morris Katz, a 27-year-old adviser to New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

“Several of [Platner]’s closest advisers pleaded with him Wednesday to strike a ‘conciliatory’ tone in the announcement terminating his Senate campaign,” Politico reported. “But the progressive bucked their advice and made it a condition of dropping out of the race that he get free rein to assail establishment Democrats and blame them for the ignominious end to his rapid political rise.”

What followed was an 11-minute pity party that, instead of hitting a Nixonian grace note, was more reminiscent of Donald Trump throwing his lunch against a White House wall and leaving ketchup dripping after his election defeat in 2020.

It began with a deep sigh from Platner, a man of tousled hair, bushy moustache and beard and grey T-shirt, against the backdrop of a grey fence and tall trees. “Everyone, it’s Graham Platner here,” he growled like a sad-eyed rottweiler. “I think as many of you know, over the past couple of days, I have faced some very serious allegations. I just want to make it clear this is all false.”

Then the candidate looked aside, became emotional and made it all about himself. “It has placed an immense amount of weight on me,” he said haltingly, “as I think about what needs to happen now.”

You need to think about what happens now? Maine Democrats have made it clear they would rather now take advice from Britain’s Count Binface. Still, with faux gravitas, Platner put his left hand to his moustache and stroked it, displaying his wedding ring. He looked down for a moment and kept going.

He spoke darkly of “larger forces” working against him. “I learned about this through press inquiries with no time to truly respond, no time for investigations before a corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury and executioner.”

There was another whiff of Trump in the sense of grievance and victimhood and the desire to blame the Democratic equivalent of the deep state along with the fake news. At least he stopped short of calling them “the enemy of the people”.

He was asking the world to believe that these forces had conspired to get Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old resident of Maine, to come forward with a detailed account of sexual assault, plus other women to accuse him of disturbing behaviour, plus Platner himself to write offensive social media posts and get a Nazi tattoo. If only the Democratic establishment was so well organised.

When Platner observed, “we live in a political system that is not built for normal people”, the implication was that he is a normal person, which the shenanigans of recent months have comprehensively disproved.

The camera became a little shaky and Platner’s voice quivered as he paid tribute to the people of Maine, the volunteers, the voters, the grassroots donors. “I have all the faith in the world that we could win if we could continue to harness that.

“But the brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.”

This was the central narrative: that “they”, a faceless cabal of nefarious elites, and not Platner’s own sordid past, had robbed Mainers of their voice. He was pitching himself as the hero of a 1970s paranoid thriller.

What comes next needs to come from the people and need to be open, transparent and democratic, he argued. “People in DC need to stay in DC. Decisions should not be made in back rooms by people in places of political power. Party apparatchiks are not the ones to make these decisions. These decisions need to be made in the open by the people of this state, the people who got us here.”

Finally, Platner was talking sense. But then came his bid for an Oscar. Swallowing hard, closing his eyes, gravel-voice cracking, he admitted: “We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me. And for that reason we are suspending campaign operations. This is incredibly difficult because I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not.”

No contrition or humility, no word of sympathy for his accusers, no acknowledgment of the mess he left behind that leaves Democrats a narrow window to field a replacement against the Republican senator Susan Collins, one of their top targets in the November fight for the Senate.

Instead one more whine about how “we did it the right way … and now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me.” There were more caresses of the ’tache and beard. “We were asking for real democracy and we did it the right way and we won. But now the ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment.

“Keep fighting,” he told the people of Maine. “We’re going to win some day.”

To say the video went down like a lead balloon would be an understatement. Emily’s List, a political action committee that helps elect Democratic women, responded on X: “11 minutes and zero accountability.” Political strategist David Axelrod wrote that Platner had played the martyr, adding: “Platner built an admirable movement. But there was nothing admirable about the way he said goodbye.”

But there was one man still speaking up for Graham Platner. “It’s really a question of whether or not you believe the woman,” observed Donald Trump, who knows whereof he speaks. “A lot of people say big falsehoods.” From one fake populist to another. Fancy a job in the cabinet?