"Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?"

Trump finally gets his White House Correspondents' Dinner speech:

Was he just supposed to take up where he left off before he was so rudely interrupted?

"I could never [do] the speech that I had ready just a short while [ago]. Oh, that was going to be a doozy. I was so psyched. I was going to rip people and I don't know, just something changed and it's really for the better. But I just wouldn't want to do that. But we'll do a little ripping if you don't mind...."

ADDED: I just listened to the whole "little ripping." He told a lot of bad jokes, often stopping to ask "who wrote this?" Sample bad joke: "I thought Kaitlan [Collins] had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I [was informed] that it wasn't her on the Bud Light can. It was Dylan Mulvaney."

Then there's the joke he said he thought was the best one: "The other day, a senator I knew got a text, a great guy, from his wife, and she said, 'When you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me.' And he said, 'I can't do both.'" He had to say, "Does anybody get that?" And then: "That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole freaking stupid speech that they wrote." They wrote. Don't blame him. He's trying to use the old Johnny Carson method of improvising jokes about how the monologue is failing. 

I see he took the same position I took on Graham Platner: "I think Platner might have done surprisingly well because we're in the age of Trump.... People can do well today. Platner, I don't know. But, you know, people don't have the guts to stick it out.... He certainly didn't defend himself very well...."

And here's the joke I thought was the best: "Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they're now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions. But I for one wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News. She's a wonderful woman."

AND: Near the end, he offers "somewhat of a scoop": "My intention to run for a fourth term as President of the United States." He puts on a red "Trump 2028" cap. It's a double joke — that he's running beyond the constitutional term limit and that he's already won more than twice — and he leans into it, to make sure they get it: "I won three times. Now I'm going to do it again.... I'm going to do it again. It should be easy. I'm getting very good at running for President. No, I won three times. Did very well the second time, by the way. It's a rigged election...."

They should have stood by Platner. Now they have to stand by Jackson, the new guy who's being foisted on Mainers.

No sooner did Maine Democrats converge on Troy Jackson as the one to replace the man that won the primary than things like this come out: "Democrat set to replace Platner in Maine led state Senate with a temper/Troy Jackson, the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), yelled and cursed at fellow state lawmakers, interviews reveal" (WaPo)(gift link).

Troy Jackson, a powerful Maine legislator now running for Senate, once angrily threw a water bottle in a meeting after he couldn’t persuade a lawmaker to vote his way. He yelled at another lawmaker, prompting her to post on social media that straight men were “too emotional” to be in politics. And he cursed and shouted in a meeting with the speaker of Maine’s state House, until she kicked him out of her office. During the six years Jackson presided over Maine’s Senate, until he left office in 2024, his temper was a feature of his leadership, and one that Democratic lawmakers discussed among themselves as a problem and even raised with the governor.... [S]ome Democrats fear that Jackson’s history of conflicts with women lawmakers could hurt him in the general election against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, given that she has won past elections in the consistently blue state by appealing to independent and left-leaning women.

He only yells at women. He doesn't rape them.

Top comment over there — guess: 

"Many of these candidates claim to espouse progressive beliefs that are similar to Graham. The thing is, it was never about the bullet points..."

"... but rather the way he was willing to speak to any issue directly and honestly that made voters love and trust him."

Said Spencer Toth, who was Graham Platner’s organizing director, quoted in "Without Platner, Maine Democrats Scramble to Keep Grassroots Energy Alive/Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate imploded last week. The activists who backed him are seeking a candidate to carry his populist message in the race against Republican Susan Collins" (NYT).

***

"Have you seen this clip?" I was asked yesterday, by a family member who texted me a clip that you might be about to link to in the comments.

My answer: "Yeah. I didn’t blog about it because I thought people would just be mean to that person who obviously didn’t belong there...."

The NYT doesn't discuss this person, Ashley Webb, but I can see that she was included in that special Democratic U.S. Senate debate. Originally, the debate was going to be limited to 4 candidates who had won at least 20% of the vote in the Democratic primaries for governor or U.S. House. When people complained about that they opened it to everyone who had filed a formal "intent to run." That was one part of the massive screwup that is ruining the Democrats’ chance to unseat Susan Collins. Laughing at Webb is low and beside the point. 

"F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts. Solidarity forever."

So writes Graham Platner, closing his letter formally withdrawing as a Senate candidate.

He says he "seek[s] to further the movement we have built together." The movement is better without him. But why? There's nothing in his letter expressing penitence or regret for anything he's done. 

"Up the Hearts" — which struck me as a possible euphemism for an obscenity — is a rallying cry for the Portland Maine soccer team, the Hearts of Pine.

He stomps off — "F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts. Solidarity forever." 

"Cory Upton-Cosulich sat in a parked car by a hiking trail in Maine this week, fuming over the implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign."

"Her anger wasn’t directed at him. It was aimed at the powerful people far away from her working-class harbor town who, one after the next, had rescinded their endorsements of a candidate she supported in the Democratic primary last month. The feeling was familiar — watching people in Washington decide who should represent her. She said she believed the woman who had accused Mr. Platner.... She decided to support him anyway, because he had promised to work on her behalf, and she believed him... [S]ome women in this independent-minded slice of the country who powered the progressive upstart’s meteoric rise are angry and grieving.... Several women said they recognized Mr. Platner’s swaggering style from men in their lives who had hurt them. They supported him anyway...."

From "Why Some Women in Maine Are Mourning the End of Graham Platner’s Campaign/They believe the accuser, but they also grieve the demise of a campaign that promised that politics could be different — and they blame those who failed to find a less flawed candidate" (NYT).

"Ms. Upton-Cosulich, 40... a mother, a pottery studio owner and a survivor of abuse... was in the kitchen of the house she cannot afford to buy when she learned that Mr. Platner had suspended his campaign. The feeling reminded her of 2016, when she read reports that officials with the Democratic National Committee had privately derided and mocked her preferred presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont...."

"I like Graham Platner. You like Graham Platner"/"That's my kind of man."

SUPERCUT!

Dems explain why Nazi tattoos & sexually aggressive behavior are fine actually pic.twitter.com/xeLPHh9fwN

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 8, 2026

"No one could have seen this coming."

I can’t believe they made a Graham Platner biopic where he’s a sexting nazi rapist graham cracker… pic.twitter.com/gYDy7fAnAh

— TBC (@TBC_on_X) July 8, 2026

"It’s tempting to treat this as a story of one flawed man and a vetting process that failed.... But the more uncomfortable lesson..."

"... is the one that the Platner boom offered before the bust. The hunger that lifted him — the overflow crowds, the volunteer armies, the sense that here, at last, was someone who meant it — was real.... Handed the chance to litigate what the party actually believes, Democrats have mostly declined.... Mr. Platner’s appeal was never really about oysters or facial hair. It was that he seemed to stand for something. He was angry on voters’ behalf about an economy that seems rigged for the powerful, and he was unafraid to say so. People responded to the promise of conviction. That signal is the one the party ought to be reading. The tragedy of a campaign like his is not only that it collapsed, as it deserved to, but that so much energy was poured into a messenger before anyone was sure of the message...."

So says the New York Times Editorial Board, in "The Democrats Can’t Go On Like This.

So "he seemed to stand for something," but we really don't know what, and instead of letting us argue publicly about what that message was and whether it is what we want, they took out the man. I think they had the ability all along to destroy him as a man, but they propped him up as a man. The Nazi tattoo was somehow okay! But when they decided they needed to replace him (presumably, because he wasn't going to win), they used the personal material to take him out.

Here's how Platner himself explained it as he bowed to the Party's demand that he drop the nomination the primary voters had given him: "I think it's really important to understand why this is happening in the timeline, why this is happening right now.... there is a reason that this is happening now...."

"It is him who is wanting to hold on. He is having to come to terms that his dream is dead. The show is over, this is done."

Said an unnamed Democrat, said to be "close to Platner," quoted in "Graham Platner, isolated, defies Maine Democrats as they try to hatch a plan/People close to the Senate candidate’s campaign say that they know he has to drop out but that Platner has struggled with the decision" (WaPo)(gift link).

And there's this, from Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party: "Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate."

But he won the primary. Shouldn't that at least mean that someone with the same political orientation should replace him? Otherwise, it seems as though the part of the Democratic Party that lost in the primary process is stealing the nomination. That means the only way Platner’s team can have any role in determining the nominee is for Platner to hang onto the nomination he won. Unfortunately for the Party, it has no role in stopping him. 

He wants to hold on? He can hold on. The dream is dead? Hold onto that dream.

 

UPDATE: Platner abandons his dream. He’s out. Watch his video here.

McDreamy.

From "Here Are the Maine Democrats Who Might Replace Graham Platner/Mr. Platner has not yet withdrawn from the race after a rape allegation, but Democrats in the state and nationally are already exploring potential alternatives" (NYT):

Platner was presented by the Democrats as fulfilling the people's supposed longing for masculinity, so, yeah, replace him with Patrick Dempsey. That makes sense.

"Rape claim against Democrat has party asking: Why did we ignore 'red flags'?"

That's the headline at the London Times, a question that assumes a proposition I don't accept as true. Democrats didn't ignore red flags. They saw them and went forward anyway.

The question should be why did they do that, and we know why. It's not hard to figure out. I don't for one minute believe that Democrats are deeply contemplating why they backed Platner despite what they knew. They wanted to win the Senate seat, and they imagined he was their best hope. Now, they are trying to act as though they were blindsided by this rape accusation, and it suddenly disqualifies Platner in a new way.

By the way, what's Platner's motivation to withdraw? He won the primary. It's his nomination. What's good is there for him in withdrawing? If he hangs on for a few more days, past the July 13th deadline for replacing him as the candidate, won't the heat die down? He will have weathered the storm, and he can present himself as a rebellious survivor.

Yes, he may lose, and that loss may be the one Senate seat that denies Democrats the majority they covet, but so what? I mean: "So what?" from his point of view. Should he shrink back into oyster-ridden obscurity because of a rape he says he did not commit? Because of a tattoo everyone knew about when he won the primary? 

"While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke..."

"... I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was 'nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.' If anything, he seems to be significantly worse...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster" (NYT).

That article she wrote and links to came out last October. It sets out to prop him up as he was falling long before the primary: "Platner is the oyster farmer and former Marine with a baritone voice and a Bernie Sanders endorsement who this fall came seemingly out of nowhere to capture progressive hearts nationwide. Recently, a barrage of ugly revelations made it look like perhaps all the hope invested in him had been misplaced...."

Hearts. Hope.

Here's Goldberg, back in October, explaining that Nazi tattoo:

"You said: He's your kind of man."

CNBC host calls out Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Host: "You campaigned with Graham Platner… you said, 'He's your kind of man.' … This is a guy who had a chest tattoo with a N*zi symbol… It's a guy that reportedly wrote 'people concerned about r*pe should take some responsibility… pic.twitter.com/zcy7r7BqnW

— Resist the Mainstream (@ResisttheMS) April 22, 2026

You can see that's from back in April, but it appeared at the top of the feed when I clicked on the "Platner" trend in the sidebar at X.

The timing of all of this matters. What did they know and when did they know it? Did they hold the accuser back and then let her loose? Look at Jake Tapper seeming to want something of an answer:

NEW: Woman who accused Graham Platner of r*ping her says America needs someone with his political stances in office, says his videos fired her up.

Jake Tapper: There are gonna be people who say this is politically motivated. What would you say to that?

Accuser Jenny Racicot:… pic.twitter.com/7jYk2i7oBg

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 6, 2026

I'm less interested in the random oysterman than I am in the Democratic Party leadership, what they were up to, and what they are doing now. It's so much like the story of Joe Biden's candidacy in 2024. They let the primary process occur, propped the guy up while democracy was in play, let the people expend their power to choose, and then and only then a fatal defect got exposed, and the people's choice had to withdraw himself. The Party got to insert their candidate, someone who never had to face the test of the primary. I want to hold the Party responsible for what it did. Was it just idiotically searching around for a "masculine" man and infatuated with his oysters? Did it cynically select him and think the people don't care about sexual misdeeds anymore — the #MeToo era is over and it's time to go for those "manosphere" votes?

ADDED: When I first clicked on this, I thought it was a humor sketch. The creaky voice on this Moraff character is something else: 

Graham Platner was recruited to run for Senate by a pair of socialist political operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who determined that another prospective candidate had “a skeleton in the closet.”

The Wall Street Journal published a rare interview with the duo on Sunday… pic.twitter.com/tbmOE5nxJX

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) June 8, 2026

AND: Scott Jennings puts it well:

Democrats fully vetted Graham Platner, happily signed off on his incredibly disturbing history to win a Senate seat, and are only pretending to be shocked now because they can no longer rationalize the hypocrisy. pic.twitter.com/jkp12Gwv16

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) July 7, 2026

"A wave of prominent Democrats, from Platner’s most progressive allies to top Democratic leadership, are bailing on his Senate campaign..."

"... after POLITICO reported that a woman who dated him said he forced her to have sex with him.... On Monday night — just hours after the story published — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on Platner to 'immediately withdraw'.... Some of his biggest backers — Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) — called on him to exit the race, as did Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Another staunch supporter and potential 2028 presidential hopeful, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, withdrew his endorsement.... Meanwhile, one of Platner’s most prominent Senate backers, Bernie Sanders, has yet to comment on the news...."

Politico reports.

Platner "represented masculinity" for the Democrats:

 

Graham Platner (D) on NPR one month ago: "I represent healthy masculinity"

This did not age well 😬 pic.twitter.com/T3bEvgvdm5

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 6, 2026

"I think Platner is probably worse than Newsom but he reminds me more of Fetterman, who I originally liked. That may be why I have never liked Platner."

"I am intimately acquainted with the genre of New England failsons, being as I am a faildaughter of that sort of edge of aristocracy myself. He has no principles as far as I can tell and no real experience in much of anything but arrogance. He’s bad news through and through, and I suspect a Dino if you will. Even without the nazi tattoos and the extremely believable and coherent accusations of sexual wrongdoing and quite possibly assault, this is not someone we need in the Senate."

Writes someone called mygothlaundry in a Metafilter discussion based on a Liberal Currents article titled "Graham Platner and the Class Politics of Impunity/Solidarity with working class women never seems to enter into it."

"Failsons" and "faildaughters"... I'd never noticed those words before, but, poking around, I can see they've been around for a while.

"He's just an outright pig. He's like a pig... He's like a pig. That's what he reminds me of."

"You know, I come up with good names for people. I don't want to stick him with that one. Although, I think pigs would be very upset about it. It's just a terrible thing. I mean, I watch it happening. It's unfolding. It's really history because there's never been a guy like that that's ever run for office at any level. I don't think at any level...."

I don't know what's especially piglike about Graham Platner. I don't know why Trump thinks he's displayed his great talent for name calling here. "Pig" is like something a child would come up with as an insulting name.

Platner, in real life, is associated with a particular animal, the oyster, so I'd be more impressed by an oyster-related epithet. Don't distract us with another animal, however disgusting. Oysters are pretty disgusting — slimy, blobby, brainless, inert. Why go looking for other animals?

Speaking of oysters, I ran across oysters in this abstruse passage that came up in my reading yesterday: "Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."

"In 1968, Janet Malcolm visited a new showroom for high-end furniture that was, she wrote, among 'the most beautiful and interesting' in New York."

"The venue was designed by Warren Platner, an architect who himself designed furniture; Donald Trump would later acquire a set of his chairs, and sounded gratified when, during an interview in 2010, a reporter from the Times recognized them. Platner’s son, Bronson, went into law, in Maine; his son Graham studied at Hotchkiss, a tony boarding school in Connecticut, though he hated it, skipped classes, and was quickly kicked out. Graham transferred to a different private school closer to home, where he starred in a production of 'My Fair Lady.' He played Henry Higgins, the haughty phonetician who teaches a lower-class flower girl to speak proper...."

Those are the opening lines of an essay by Jon Allsop titled "The Changing Face of 'Authenticity' in Politics/What Graham Platner’s scandal-plagued Senate run says about a tired cliché" (The New Yorker).

Here's how Platner entered the political arena, last summer:

Allsop ponders "authenticity":

Dirtbagism.

I'm reading "Graham Platner and the Rise of the ‘Dirtbag’ Democrat/And what the Maine candidate reveals about politics today" in the NYT.

That's long, so let's jump to the place where the word "dirtbag" is thrown into the mix:

Michelle Cottle: And honestly, is it even fair to compare Platner to somebody like Paxton or Trump? 

Jamelle Bouie: You know, I don’t think it’s fair. And I say that because, so far, what we’ve learned about Platner is that, for lack of a better term, he’s kind of a dirtbag. Just a dirtbaggy kind of guy.... That’s versus Trump, who isn’t just a reprehensible person, but is actively engaged in harming other people in his private life, right? And I’d say the same for Paxton: not just a slimy guy, but a guy whose modus operandi, as a human being, is to try to dominate the people around him in really ugly ways. And so, I think Platner is more on the John Fetterman continuum than he is on the Trump continuum, which is just, eh, kind of dirtbaggy.

Cottle: OK, so I want to drill down just a little bit more....

The drilling down does not explore the concept of dirtbagism. Cottle was swooping in to take the conversation away from that, even though the headline writer saw the click-bait value of the word. In the conversation, "dirtbag" never reappears.

I asked Grok "how the word 'dirtbag' is being deployed what kind of people use that term and why" and got quickly tracked into the subject of the "dirtbag left." There's this New Yorker article from last October: "What Explains Graham Platner’s Popularity? The U.S. Senate candidate from Maine seems like the embodiment of the dirtbag left. But there’s another way to understand his appeal." Excerpt:

Platner presents his weary face to the camera

Chris Hayes confronts Platner with the damaging accusations that the NYT published.

He was, he say, "not a good boyfriend." He was "self-medicating with alcohol." It was a "pretty dark period' of his life.

"Lyndsey Fifield, 40... recalled [Graham Platner] as 'cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions, of our "weakness."'"

"Ms. Fifield, who dated Mr. Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, said that his offensive online posts 'reminded me of just how much he hated women.' Jenny Racicot, 41... who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. 'When I saw the old comments that he made online,' she said, 'I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.'... Ms. Racicot also said that in 2021 he arrived at her house drunk, after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior 'reckless' and 'unsettling.'"

From "Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior/The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing" (NYT).

"Democrats really, really like Platner in Maine but the Republicans f***ing love him … if Maine wants an asshole with a Nazi tattoo on his chest, they get him."

Said John Fetterman, quoted in "Graham Platner 'sexted women.' Senior Democrats fear voters won’t care/Sexually explicit texts have piled pressure on the candidate for Maine. Long-serving party insiders say it’s a test of the tolerance for scandal" (London Times).

I'm getting my American news from The London Times this morning. For this post, I was charmed by the description of Fetterman as "the Democrats’ most unbiddable member in the upper chamber."

I think it's funny to call the Senate "the upper chamber," and I have to go talk with AI to get a handle on what "unbiddable" means. Once you see the root, "bid," as the "bid" in the phrase "do as you are bid," it's easy to see the meaning of "unbiddable." You can't tell Fetterman what to do.

I spend some time musing about the word "bid" — looked it up in the OED, read the very lengthy etymology, and scanned the quotes. Here's one from a 1984 book called "Country Voices," which is a collection of oral histories from rural England: "You didn't go to a funeral unless you were all in mourning, and you didn't go unless you were what they called ‘bid.' When anybody had died, there'd be a young man come round to bid you to the funeral..the joiner's lad."

Do you see why it would be the joiner's lad? And would you like that approach to funerals? You don't just decide for yourself should I go or not.