Clearing the Field: Dem Candidate with Nazi Tattoo Will Be the Nominee

Welcome to the Three Martini Lunch.

Grab a stool next to Greg Corumbus of Radio America

and Jim Garrity of National Review.

Three Martini's coming up.

We're so glad you're with us for the Thursday edition

of the Three Martini Lunch.

And Jim, there are always certain Senate races

that we pay a lot of attention to from cycle to cycle

and one of the ones that's already gotten a lot of attention

is up in Maine, which has big news today.

Conflicting emotions, really, for Grand Platinum in Maine.

First of all, to tough day for him

because this is the day Hitler died back in 1945.

I looked that up and I was debating

and I was like, I can't go there.

Greg, you did it for me.

Thank God bless you.

But it now looks like he's got a glide path

to the Democratic nomination

because Democratic Governor Janet Mills

is dropping out of the race.

Her statement says while I have the drive

and passion, commitment and experience

and above all else, the fight to continue on

I very simply do not have the one thing

political campaigns unfortunately require today

the financial resources.

They say Senator Susan Collins, the incumbent,

of course, has 10 million on hand.

Platner has 2.7 million on hand.

Governor Mills with 1 million on hand.

She had a poultry fundraising quarter, I guess,

which has led to this.

And so Jim Platner was way ahead in the polls.

This was likely to happen anyway.

The primary was set for June 9th.

But now I guess everybody can focus

on the general election and Collins can unleash

everything from her arsenal and so can Platner.

What do you make of the latest?

Yeah, things have been trending

in this direction for a long time

and it's not just the disparity

in the amount of rights marks that the candidates have raised.

Late last week, Mills vetoed legislation

that the state legislature had passed

that would ban data centers in the state.

And she said that she agreed that data centers are terrible

with her energy use and they have terrible health effects

and their water use and all that stuff.

But there was one data center planned in one town

where the mill had burned down

and that they really needed the jobs.

So I guess in that town it's okay to have

the higher electricity rates and the health effects

and all that stuff because they're unemployed.

I didn't find her position particularly consistent

but nonetheless I also thought that if you were fighting

a tooth and nail fight in a Senate democratic primary

you generally didn't want to, you know,

earn the progressives with a move like that.

And so that to me was an early indicator

of an impending surrender.

Dear listeners, I regret to inform you Paris has fallen.

There is an attempt to evacuate troops from Dunkirk.

Look, I went on the corner post today

and just did every Nazi metaphor you possibly could imagine.

It was a lot of fun but it was also kind of deeply

distressing about this.

And my colleague Phil Klein pointed out that like why?

Like nobody heard of Graham Platner two or three years ago.

Right, he's an oyster guy.

Out of nowhere he has gotten to not just frontrunner status

but like solid frontrunner status over a two-term governor.

Now, Janet Mills had significant weaknesses.

She was old, she was the establishment.

It's understandable that post Joe Biden,

the democratic party might not be not interested

in nominating a first-time Senate candidate in her late 70s.

It's like you get that.

But you know, Phil contends that in the end

anti-Israel positions, anti-Semitism and all that

is really what has driven Platner to his nomination

in a Blitzkrieg move.

Look, in the end, Mills was always gonna be a less

than ideal candidate she was to old.

Her methods were outdated.

In the end, you can think of her as the marginal line.

And up until now, you know, the youth were with Platner.

Just for insert, youth joke here.

Most of his support was amongst the cities

on the East Coast, banker, Lewiston, stuff like that.

But you can expect quick aggressive expanse

and heading in the Western direction.

You know, he's gonna bombard.

The television air war is gonna begin in earnest.

They're gonna bombard main residents with mailers.

And I think you're just gonna see rapid deployment

of door knockers, storming neighborhoods

all across the state.

And for those who have forgotten,

the whole probably talk about a bunch of important issues.

But I most remember, he wants to put more Americans on trains.

And, you know, there's no unfortunate implications of that.

Never, never again.

Like, we're joking.

And it's fun.

Oh, by the way, one last fun fact, Susan Collins

for Public and Common Senator.

You know, I like to point out that she beat Saragitian.

The last Democrat was supposed to knock her off.

Collins trailed every poll in six years ago.

By a pretty significant margin,

one by like eight or nine points on election day.

So first of all, the good news is Susan Collins

is capable of just a Normandy invasion's worth of surprises

to any opponent.

Okay, one last, like not really a metaphor,

just an honest route.

Susan Collins father, Donald Collins,

wounded twice during the battle of the bull.

She is a World War II veteran.

Earned two purple hearts and broad stars.

So he was also a state senator.

So I just, you could say,

she's continuing the family tradition of fighting Nazis.

And like, yeah, we're cracking a lot of jokes.

But in the end, you know, for anybody,

there's like why, you know, if you missed past episodes

or you don't know the backstory,

why are Jim and Greg joking

about the main Democratic Senate candidate being a Nazi?

So he has the tattoo of the Nazi SS Totten cough.

He got it, he says what he was in the Balkans and the army.

It's a skull and crossbones.

He thought, oh, I thought it was the pirate.

It doesn't look anything like what you're used

to seeing on a pirate flag.

If you've seen any Nazi movie,

any Indiana Jones movie,

you've seen this on the cap of the SS officers, right?

It's very distinctive.

But the only thing that he had it for 18 years.

And in, you know, in between,

we've seen profiles of Graham Platner,

a military history buff.

Oh, really?

This military history buff never recognized

and never, he's looking at this tattoo on his chest

in the mirror for a period long enough

for a baby born to be old enough to vote.

And he never notices that.

Oh, by the way, there are friends who said,

yes, this is who said he had said,

this is Mike Doughton cough,

this is my SS tattoo.

The campaign staffer who quit his campaign

said he had said, yeah, I have a camp up a tattoo

that I know might be problematic.

You know, Platner's claim is like,

ah, I didn't even know this was a Nazi symbol

until I heard about other campaigns

doing opposition research on me.

He was completely oblivious to it.

I don't believe him.

I think he was at minimum Nazi curious for a period

and probably a very long period.

And Nazi curious is a really generous way of putting it.

And again, I think if you remember,

if you support lower taxes, you're a Nazi

to a whole bunch of Democrats.

But the only guy who's not a Nazi is the guy

with the SS tattoo on his chest,

which is like, it's absurd, it's funny,

but it's also very depressing at the same time.

Because it's a non-zero chance

this guy could win

in what's probably gonna be a good year for Democrats.

Yeah, he's got a polling lead of about six

to seven points on average.

But as you've mentioned,

that's been the case for Susan Collins

for a number of cycles now.

And she always seems to define a way.

So hopefully that's the case.

Couldn't have a bigger contrast.

I know you like to call Susan Collins

part of the nice lady caucus in the Senate.

So up against Graham Platner,

who even when he's not doing things

that make you think of the third Reich,

he's at least being completely bullish and ignorant.

And yesterday, we talked about Mallory McMoro

and those old tweets and you're thinking,

well, the ads, the ads just write themselves.

Well, in this case, Susan Collins

doesn't even need to make the ads

because Janet Mills has already made them instead.

Here's the ad that she tried to run against

Graham Platner just a couple of weeks ago.

Did you know Graham Platner wrote

that women worried about rape need to quote?

Now get so f*** up, they wind up having sex

with someone they don't mean to.

It's disgusting.

Platner wrote to avoid rape, women should quote.

Act like an adult for f*** sake.

Graham Platner, seriously.

We blame the victim.

That's a horrible thing to say.

Just qualify.

I have not seen this.

He's a bully.

This guy gives off a vibe.

It's just no way I could vote for you.

No.

Graham Platner, the closer you look, the worse it gets.

I'm Janet Mills and I approve this message.

That turns out most of those ladies

were Mills staffers and other supporters.

But Jim, when Susan Collins already has that

before she's even lifted a finger or spent a dime,

you got a little bit of momentum on your side.

Greg, he does give off a vibe

that he wants to invade Poland.

And does Mills then endorse Platner?

I assume she will.

And there'll be some version of look.

Donald Trump is a menace and a fascist threat

to all we hold dear.

So you have to vote for the Nazi.

That's, that's where we're headed folks.

Yeah.

And I told a 180 over at the Democratic

Senatorial Campaign Committee,

which Chuck Schumer personally recruited Janet Mills

into this race.

DSCC statement.

It's not shocking that Schumer would look at this guy

and go, uh-oh, this is going to go very badly for me.

Their statement after years of allowing Trump's abuses

of power, Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable.

And we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee

Graham Platner to defeat her.

So Chuck Schumer, you call them the Vichy Democrats, I guess.

So anyway, all right.

Enough parodies aside.

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All right, let's move to another political race now, Jim.

That could not be much further apart

from the main Senate race in the contiguous United States,

at least.

And that's the LA mayor's race.

We talked not that long ago how it looks like Karen Bass

has a far too easy path to reelection

after her disastrous time in the mayor's office.

But the most prominent opponent she has, of course,

is Spencer Pratt, famous for being a reality star

with MTV a couple of decades ago,

lost his home in the palisades fire

and has ever since been a very strong

and vocal activist against bass

and what wasn't done ahead of the fires,

what wasn't done during the fires,

what hasn't been done after the fires.

So he's out with a new 30-second spot

that has a lot of people turning their heads

and saying this is pretty effective at.

This is where mayor Bass lives.

You notice something?

Or here, where Nithya Rahman's $3 million mansion sits.

They don't have to live in the mess they've created

where you live.

This is where I live.

They let my home burn down.

I know what the consequences of failed leadership are.

That's why I'm running for mayor,

for my sons and the rest of us, Angelinos,

that want to stop these corrupt politicians

from destroying our city.

We are going to get the golden age of Los Angeles back.

So Jim, a lot there.

Karen Bass, living on easy street as he points out

while everybody else is stuck with huge costs

and having lived in close to major homeless populations

and so forth.

You can't hear it in the ad if you can't see it.

But he lives in a trailer now

because his home in the palisades burn down.

So I don't know what the polling is.

I haven't seen any polling on this, but it's clear

that he's going to push it as hard as he can

to make this a real race against Karen Bass.

Yeah, we head into this knowing that Los Angeles

is a very democratic city.

And it's a very hard for any, not just non-democrat,

non-machine democrat to win in this city.

But there are times where you lose to an opponent

and you feel like it's a worthy opponent.

Karen Bass is not a worthy opponent.

Karen Bass, she's not remarkably charismatic.

She's not this great innovative thinker.

She's a longtime congresswoman

who stepped into the mayor's office

and seemed to think it was like a part-time

semi-retirement job.

And it's not.

This is a very tough job.

And she was literally on the other side of the world

when one of the worst disasters to hit her state.

And there's been a lot of debating

about how much did she know?

At minimum, National Weather Service was saying

there was high risk of wildfires before she left.

If there was any evidence that she had turned around,

the first time she saw that there was how bad things were.

I think the damage from this would have been mitigated.

The reputational damage to her would have been mitigated.

There is no evidence of that.

She was at the US Embassy party

as the flames were consuming large portions of the palisades.

We all saw the video of her coming back on the plane,

ignoring the questions to the reporter.

Like she didn't have any good answers

because she didn't have any good answers.

There was no excuse for it.

To me, I would have supported the recall effort.

I think there was no way you can't remain in office.

The idea of her winning reelection is absurd.

Now look, is Pratt the perfect guy?

Probably not the boy.

If you're an Angelino who was hurt by the wildfires,

he knows exactly how you feel.

That is lived experience for him.

And you got to figure he's going to be really motivated

to do as much as he can

and whatever time he has

to rebuild that city

and get it back on its feet

and back the way it ought to be.

So there are a lot of disperating defeats in politics.

It would be particularly disperating

if Karen Bass not only wins a reelection

but doesn't have to work for it.

Doesn't have to sweat for it.

If Pratt comes close,

it'll be like, okay, at least, you know,

there's a warning shot across your bow, so to speak,

to say, look, you did a really loud job in your first term.

You have to do better.

Well, alternative is like LA has become super poorly run

that anybody within a good sense has left

and that, you know, they don't want to live in a trailer

the way Pratt is

while they're waiting for the approval

and the regulations and the red tape to get their house rebuilt.

So, and also like, you know, again, if you're a Democrat,

how proud are you of Karen Bass?

How eager are you to run and say,

oh, LA isn't good hands.

No, it's not.

So, good luck, Pratt.

You have a very tough road ahead of you,

but I think you've got a strong argument.

We'll see how far Mark can take you.

Yeah, he's got to be an upgrade if he were to be elected

and it's been rumored online that he's a Republican.

I don't know this officially or a non-partisan

in this race.

It's like Caruso suddenly stopped being a Republican

in the moment, you need to run for mayor, so.

No, it was not a Reagan library board.

He's one of mine.

That's exactly right.

But you can follow the pattern.

If you're running in an indigo blue area like LA County

or the city of LA in this case, you know,

you got to follow the model of one of those areas.

You're tough on crime.

You're against corruption.

You're, you know, for fiscal accountability.

What are you just spending?

Probably want to, you know,

probably don't want to raise taxes.

Probably friendly to the business community.

But that person could be at any party.

Yes, it could be.

But it's increasingly not in the Democratic party anymore.

So we'll keep an eye on that one.

We'll have more on California politics in our chaser today.

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All right, Jim, onto our third martini.

And also the subject of your morning jolt

today.

It was on Monday that the Atlantic published a story

suggesting that there is perhaps a rift developing

when it comes to the Iran war between the Office

of the Vice President, JD Vance and the information

that they're getting from the Pentagon.

Specifically, there's concerns that the Pentagon

is not accurately informing President Trump

about the progress of the war in Iran

or the level of US stockpiles of critical weapons.

And we've talked about that before just

in terms of arming the Ukrainians,

whether the US stockpile would be replenished

at a rate necessary to make us able to actually fight a war

elsewhere in the world.

And so you talk about that at great length in the story.

The fact that this has not been really pushed back

against in three days now makes you wonder

whether this rift is developing.

JD Vance has certainly not been a fan of wars like this.

He's been a pretty good trooper in public in terms

of the policy.

But as you read this story, what stands out to you?

And what are the possible pitfalls moving forward here?

Well, I've already had a few folks say some version of,

oh, Jim, how can you believe the reporting

from the Atlantic?

You know, the Atlantic has gotten out of the stories

wrong in the past.

Okay, I get that.

I hear those complaints.

But this is very much in line with JD Vance's

stances both as a senator and a candidate back then

and also as a on the campaign trail of 2024, 2024.

As a podcast, he says, our interest, I think very much

is in not going to war with Iran.

It would be a huge distraction of resources.

It would be massively expensive to our country, end quote.

And so like, I don't see anything in this Atlantic article

that sounds like, oh, JD Vance would never say

something like that.

And in fact, the interesting it sounds like the sources

go out of their way to say, look,

this is not something personal with Pete Hague Seth.

But and it's not outright directly accusing Hague Seth

or anybody else depending on it being a liar

or lying about the progress in the war.

But also that there's skepticism, that there's worryness.

There's a sure about that kind of questioning this.

And I think those are entirely legitimate things

for a lawmaker to do.

But we're stuck with like two potentially bad scenarios.

Potential bad scenario number one is that the Pentagon

is not giving the president the full picture.

And we've heard various reports about whether there are

more strikes against US planes on the ground

in all around the bases of the Middle East

but hearing about that the damage is worse than they've said.

You know, if you accuse the Pentagon

of misleading the president on matters of life

and that's a big deal, right?

That is a, this, you know,

and if the Pentagon isn't giving the president

the best information available,

the most accurate information available,

well, it's very hard to make good decisions about the war,

right?

You're more likely to make some decision that is, you know,

wrong and has really bad consequences

because you're acting on bad information.

But if the administration is, you know,

getting accurate information from the president

and this is a false accusation,

well, then now you got the vice president of the United States

and his aides or let's say not the vice president.

Let's just say just the aides leaking to the Atlantic

which does have this notorious reputation

amongst Republicans and conservatives

saying that the Pentagon's lying and that that would certainly

feel like somebody who didn't like the war trying to undermine it.

And so short answer, I don't know quite who's right.

I did look at a Center for Strategic International Studies.

They did the best assessment analysis they could

based on what's publicly available.

For obvious reasons, depending on does not say

this is how many of this kind of missile we have left,

this is how many of that kind of missile we have left,

things like that.

The short answer is that it's probably going to take us

four years to get back to our pre-war levels.

Now, when you get into, when you launch

the largest military campaign against the Iranian state ever

and probably the largest since Iraq,

Afghanistan, desert storm, stuff like that,

you're going to burn through missiles pretty darn fast.

I think that's an unavoidable consequence of going to war.

The question then, and you know,

Hegseth has talked about how they're doing the very best

they can to increase our defense production capacity.

You know, taking four years to get back up to pre-war levels,

that's not nothing to sneeze at.

That does strike me as a really legitimate concern

that I understand they can't get into specifics.

I don't want to disclose that stuff,

but it certainly sounds like members of Congress

are asking the same kind of fair questions as well.

And look, if we don't have the stockpiles,

does that risk China invading Taiwan?

Does that risk North Korea doing something against South Korea?

Does that, you know, make Russia act friskier?

And I think those are, you know,

all very legitimate concerns,

but I'd also point out, you know,

we're now close to two months into this war,

and we haven't seen China invade Taiwan

or North Korea take action or Russia take action.

I suspect watching the US military do what it's doing

and the fact that Chinese air defenses

look like they're made by Timo,

probably as a sign that like,

oh, we don't necessarily, like if you watch

the US performance yesterday and you think,

oh yeah, we can take these guys.

You're probably a henchman in the TV show Reacher.

For those who don't know,

a Reacher played by Alan Richardson

is a massive dude, muscles on top of muscles.

He looks like he could pick on Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And for some reason in that show,

bad guys are always starting fist fights with them.

And there's never a water says,

you know, this guy's really,

I'm not gonna win this fight.

I'm just not gonna,

I'm just not getting into this fight.

And so my sense is like,

I don't think if you're China or North Korea

or Russia or any of these other countries,

you're looking at the US war against Iran

and saying, oh yeah,

US is a paper tiger we can take.

You know, probably not, probably,

probably it'll be a lot of tough fighting you.

So maybe we are having an effective,

an effective deterrent effect from this war,

but it's thorny, it's complicated.

And I have my disagreements with the Vice President,

but these seem like fair questions to ask.

Also, Hague Seth,

can he be bombastic?

Sure, absolutely.

I don't love him starting his hearing yesterday

by saying the biggest adversary we face at this point

are the reckless, feckless,

and deftest words of congressional Democrats

and some Republicans.

Greg, I don't know about you,

but I kinda think the biggest adversary

that the US would face at this point in the war against Iran

would be Iran because they're shooting.

That strike may as really the biggest obstacle.

You can be annoyed by congressional statements and stuff.

So hopefully we get clarity on this,

but I'm not gonna hold my breath, Greg.

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All right, Jim, for our chaser today,

we had back to California politics.

And of course, the shakeup and the shuffle continues

in the California governor's race after Eric Swalwell

was forced to drop out after scandal.

There's been a couple of debates,

new polls coming out.

And there's a new poll out that shows Basera slightly ahead

of Steve Hilton,

and then it gets pretty tight after that with Steyer

and Bianco and some of the others here.

But there's a new poll out.

And it's how they describe the candidates in the poll.

That's the insane part here.

Instead of Katie Porter being a former congresswoman,

she's a consumer protection advocate.

Antonio Virragosa, he's not the former mayor of LA.

He's a housing affordability advocate

and Javier Basera, who's been HHS Secretary

and California Attorney General.

No, no, no, no, voting rights attorney.

So I don't know what they're trying to pull here,

but this is insane.

There's this is weird.

And the other thing is that all of these candidates

have fairly high no opinion or never heard of them.

I would completely understand

if you feel like you'd never heard

of housing affordability advocate Antonio Virragosa.

I've heard of LA mayor, Antonio Virragosa.

Actually, LA mayor and famous Telemundo

corresponded seducer Antonio Virragosa.

They let him love her stereotype.

It's just kind of this like,

it's 25% said they had not heard of him,

which seems high for a guy who was mayor of LA.

It was a while ago, but again,

that just seems a little bit weird.

The other thing is we know consumer protection advocate,

Katie Porter.

Do you think her ex-husband felt protected

from those potatoes?

I don't think so.

Curiously the lowest, the one with the best name recognition

is Tom Steyer.

I would get billionaire Tom Steyer,

former presidential candidate Tom Steyer.

Does he care about the climate?

Sure, but I'm sure all of these other ones

are like, wait a, I care about the climate too.

I'm a climate advocate.

This is bizarre.

This is a real, and I don't get,

there's no explanation here about why

they identified the candidates this way.

You'd say, oh, they were trying to avoid

attribute their former elected office

or their current elected office,

but they also sent us a mayor of Manhattan.

So I don't, there's no logic or rhyme

or reason to it.

Because like, you know, is Antonio Virragosa

the only housing affordability advocate in this case?

You look at that and you're like,

do they know that certain topics poll well?

So they want to associate their preferred candidate

with that topic.

Whereas like, ah, you know,

consumer protection, who cares about that?

So let's stick Kitty Porter with that or something like that.

You and I would say infamous domestic abuser

and potato cook, you know,

would be the way we describe that.

So famous plaid tie wearer, Tom Steyer,

and stuff like that.

Famous failed HHS secretary under Biden.

Have you ever, by the way,

somebody put out every autobiography

that has come out of the Biden administration to come for?

And have your basera comes off terrible in all of them.

And it's kind of like, you want to talk about the least valuable player,

the Mr. Irrelevant of the Biden cabinet

and a lot of competition for that title.

But you can make a strong case for have your basera.

Yeah, he's got a very weak field.

I think that's why he's improving his chances here.

I'm going to, I'm going to cut via Virragosa a little bit of slack here.

First of all, if you're running as a housing affordability advocate in California,

your advocacy's not working too well.

Secondly, I would not be running on being mayor of LA

for any other office right now,

given the quality of the current mayor of LA.

I don't think that would reflect you.

At minimum, like, not current mayor of LA.

Former high stress.

Very little of the city burned down on my watch.

So almost none.

Amazing.

A lot to keep watching.

Jim, see you tomorrow.

I'll be Friday.

All right, see you tomorrow.

Jim Garrett, a national review.

I'm Greg Carumbus of Radio America.

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