Graham Platner’s old Reddit posts mocking the Army and a wounded veteran have become a major campaign problem in Maine’s U.S. Senate race. The Democrat’s presumptive nominee is now facing scrutiny over remarks he made under the account “P-Hustle,” including a 2019 post that described the Army as “absolute trash” and another that said a wounded Army veteran “didn’t deserve to live.”
The posts matter now because Platner is trying to unseat GOP Sen. Susan Collins, and the resurfaced comments have pushed his online history into the center of that contest. In the April 2019 post, he wrote that he spent another four years in the Army after the Corps, but called the service “absolute trash,” said it was “full of fat, lazy trash who would rather not be in uniform,” and added that the Army “does things differently, and as a whole, they do things much worse.”
Platner also wrote that the Army “does have some squared away fighting units and good guys, as well as some better doctrine here and there,” but said it was “absolutely lacking in the warrior ethos and leadership obsession that the Corps has, and generally attracts a lower standard of person.” In another 2019 comment, this one about wounded Army veteran Teddy Daniels, he wrote that the “dumb motherf---er didn’t deserve to live.”
Platner served in the Marine Corps and the Maryland Army National Guard and completed multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had already used crude language about civilians in a 2013 Reddit post, writing that civilians can be as dumb f--k ret---ed as they want, but that “WE have a duty to be brutally honest.” The Washington Free Beacon first reported on Platner’s disparaging comments directed toward the Army.
The backlash also lands in a race where Platner’s now-deleted Reddit account has become a liability for reasons beyond the Army posts. Other posts included slurs, remarks that demeaned white rural Americans and comments in which he identified as a Marxist, all of which have sharpened the scrutiny as he tries to make his case to Maine voters. Collins called the remarks “just appalling,” a sign that the issue is unlikely to fade as the campaign moves forward.
The broader tension is straightforward: it is not unusual for service members to be bluntly critical of other branches, but Platner’s own words go well past routine interservice ribbing. What is now at stake is whether voters see the posts as evidence of bad judgment that disqualifies him from replacing Collins, or as old online trash talk from a combat veteran that should be weighed against the rest of his record.
