In his defense of the tattoo, Blattner, a Democrat from Maine, takes a page from Trump’s playbook to continue his Senate bid.

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Graham Blattner, a U.S. Senate candidate for Maine, revealed Tuesday that he was tattooed years ago with an image widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, but he dismissed the connotation and attributed it to a drunken Marine’s attempt at intimidation. He said he plans to remove the tattoo.

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Blatner is the latest Democratic candidate to shrug off grim revelations about his past, reflecting a new era in politics and the example set by President Donald Trump, who forged ahead without fearing the controversies that would have ended his campaign just a decade ago.

The new revelations about Blattner come after a series of controversial statements were discovered online, including one in which he denied sexual assault in the military. It also follows the pattern set by Jay Jones, this year’s Democratic nominee for Virginia’s attorney general, who refused to drop out of the race even after text messages surfaced in which he suggested in 2022 the state’s leading Republican would get “two bullets to the head.”

Jones apologized for the comments, which also included suggesting that the children of his then-Republican opponent faced the same fate.

Jones remains a candidate in Virginia’s November 4 election, saying it is up to voters to judge his qualifications for office. The related scandal spilled over into the state’s governor’s race, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger was forced to address it repeatedly.

Blatner’s old posts raise new questions

Blatner, a Democrat and oyster farmer, has caused a stir among progressives in Maine, especially since two-term Governor Janet Mills entered the Democratic race for US Senate last week. The two Democrats are competing for the opportunity to challenge Republican Senator Susan Collins, who has been in office for 30 years.

Blatner attempted to explain his previous online comments in a video posted on social media last week. In it he addressed not only his previous comments dismissing military sexual assaults, but also his questioning of the bounty habits of black shepherds and criticism of police officers and rural Americans.

“I see someone I don’t know,” he said in a five-minute video.

Blatner sought to distance himself from comments posted online between 2013 and 2021 during an interview on the Democratic podcast Pod Save America published Tuesday, calling them the nonsense of a recent veteran.

“That was a moment in time where I hadn’t been exposed to things yet, and I had an opinion or thoughts that were colored by my experience in ministry,” he said during the podcast.

But Blattner himself mentioned the tattoo, which he says he got in 2007 when he was in his twenties. He said he got it in Kosovo while on leave with the Marines during a night of drinking. A video aired during the podcast shows Plattner dancing shirtless with the tattoo visible on his upper chest.

He and his fellow Marines chose a “terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines, and you know, skulls and crossbones are a pretty normal military thing,” Blattner said.

A prominent anti-Semitism advocacy group, the Anti-Defamation League, reviewed the video and identified the image in the tattoo as a specific symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary forces, or SS, which were responsible for the systematic killing of millions of Jews and others in Europe during World War II.

“This appears to be a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, and if true, it is troubling that a candidate for high office would have a tattoo,” Oren Segal, the Anti-Defamation League’s vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence, said in an email response to an AP inquiry.

“We understand that sometimes people get tattoos without understanding their hateful association. In these cases, the wearer should be asked whether he disavows his hateful meaning.”

Blatner on the meaning of the tattoo: It never appeared

In a statement to The Associated Press late Tuesday, Blattner said, “I didn’t realize that this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol until I started hearing from journalists and insiders in D.C. I wouldn’t have lived my life with this on my chest if I had known that — and to suggest that I did that is disgusting. And I already plan to have this tattoo removed.”

Blattner added that in the 20 years after getting the tattoo, he joined the Army, “which included a full physical examination to check the tattoo for symbols of hate. I also passed a full background check to obtain a security clearance to join the ambassador’s security detail in Afghanistan.”

He said the idea of ​​his tattoo as a Nazi symbol had never been raised.

But a former senior Blatner employee said he should have known.

“He may not have known it when he got it, but he got it years ago and should have covered it up because he knew full well what it meant,” Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, who left the campaign last week, said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.

Blatner is running against Mills in next year’s primary.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has endorsed Blatner, has been sticking by the nominee, telling reporters Tuesday that Blatner is an “excellent candidate.”

“I will support him,” Sanders added.

Democrats are following in the Trump campaign’s footsteps

These episodes, including Jones’ dramatic discoveries in Virginia, come a decade after Trump rewrote the standard for what could derail an election campaign.

Trump won the 2016 presidential election even after recordings emerged 11 years ago of him speaking to an Access Hollywood reporter in which he bragged in obscene terms about having made sexual advances toward women other than his wife. Trump also pointed to “very fine people, on both sides” of a 2017 incident in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman protesting against a white nationalist demonstration was run over and killed by a white supremacist in his car.

Most recently, Trump was elected to a second non-consecutive term in 2024 after being impeached twice during his first term and later convicted of 34 criminal counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by secretly paying a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump denied the allegation.

“I think there’s a feeling among Democrats that if Republicans can ignore calls to withdraw, why shouldn’t we?” Todd Belt, director of the George Washington University Graduate School of Policy, said:

During an attorney general campaign debate last week, Jones raised the same issue, referring to Trump’s speech in which he urged his supporters to run in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, before many of them stormed the US Capitol in the riot on January 6, 2021.

“What about when Donald Trump used incendiary language to incite a riot to try to overturn the election here in this country?” Jones said.

Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa, and Crozzi reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti in Washington also contributed to this report.