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Mark D. Brewer is a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine. The views expressed here are his own.
Much of our political attention in Maine, and indeed in the United States as a whole, so far in this election cycle has been focused on Graham Platner. Since bursting onto the state and eventually national political stage in August 2025, Platner has generated strong and enthusiastic support among Democrats of seemingly all stripes. This in and of itself is not terribly surprising.
Platner is highly charismatic and a skilled public speaker. His personal story of growth and redemption is naturally appealing. Moreover, Platner’s tough-guy persona and no-nonsense approach meet the moment in contemporary Democratic Party politics, where many party members are looking for a champion who they believe will tear down politics as usual and replace it with something more likely to serve what they see as the common good.
While Platner’s strengths as a candidate are responsible for a portion of the attention he has been receiving, the bulk of the media spotlight on his candidacy is due to a string of controversies that have arisen from his self-admittedly messy personal life. Within months of announcing his Senate candidacy in an attention-grabbing video, a stream of negative incidents and allegations related to Platner’s past emerged.
First were old social media posts, followed soon by the revelation of a tattoo that closely resembled a Nazi skull and crossbones symbol known as a Totenkopf. Within the last two weeks there has been a Wall Street Journal article about Platner sending text messages of a sexual nature to women who were not his wife and a New York Times article where some ex-girlfriends of Platner alleged behaviors that many would consider unsettling.
This is where surprise enters in. In American politics of the not-too-distant past, a relatively unknown and untested candidate who suddenly found themselves confronted with a lengthy history of derogatory statements regarding women or Black people or veterans or rural dwellers — much less all of these groups — would have been in real trouble politically. The same is true regarding the revelations of communications of a sexual nature with women who were not the candidate’s wife or allegations of troubling relationships with multiple women. The revelation of a Nazi tattoo would have almost certainly been immediately disqualifying for elected office. But so far, despite heavy media coverage of these controversies, Platner remains in good political standing and is now the Democratic Party’s nominee to be the next U.S. senator from Maine.
How can this be?
The short answer is that American politics has changed. More specifically, the public’s standards on what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for candidates and office holders are very different today than they were just 20 or 30 years ago. The explanation of this important shift is multifaceted and complex. But the most important cause resides in the White House.
Donald Trump has single-handedly changed the standard of behavior that Americans deem acceptable in their candidates for and holders of public office. Trump pushed the established boundaries of acceptability from the very first moments of his formal entrance into American politics, identifying immigrants from Mexico as “rapists” who bring “crime” and “drugs” into the U.S. in his campaign announcement speech at Trump Tower in June 2015.
Trump soon smashed through the boundaries altogether, regularly making comments that by previous standards would have been seen by the average American as too crude, vulgar or offensive for any legitimate candidate for public office, much less a candidate for president. Such comments are far too numerous to fully list here, but for a small sampling one could direct their attention to Trump’s characterization of former Arizona senator and prisoner of war John McCain, his comments regarding then-Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly after an early debate among Republican candidates, or his mocking of a New York Times reporter with a disability. All were eyebrow raising attention-getters when Trump first said them but my guess is that none of them would even move the needle today.
The instance where it became definitively clear that previously existing standards did not apply to Trump was the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape. That short recording could easily have been campaign, if not career, ending. But not for Trump. Not only did his campaign survive the tape’s release, but he went on to win election as president a month later.
During his first presidential campaign Trump famously bragged that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York City and not lose any of his supporters. So far, Trump’s boast has metaphorically proven true.
I’ve often told my students that Donald Trump is a unique presence in American politics, a unicorn that we should be careful in drawing generalizations from. I still believe this is true. But it can also be true that Trump’s comments and behaviors have changed the standards for all political candidates and office holders. Indeed, his record of statements and actions over the last 10 years makes one wonder if there is any standard of unacceptability remaining in American politics. American politics has become Trumpified.
Public reaction to the controversies surrounding Graham Platner is the most recent example of this. It won’t be the last.