Political irony in the year 2026 just became almost too rich to parody.  

This week, Democrats in Maine nominated a man named Graham Platner as their candidate for the United States Senate against incumbent Republican Susan Collins.  What makes that remarkable is that Platner's candidacy commenced under an immediate cloud of embarrassment when images surfaced of a giant Nazi SS tattoo on his chest.  

As if to deliberately amplify the absurdity, Platner immediately claimed that he – a military veteran familiar with such symbolism – somehow missed the trademark SS symbol’s significance.  

Sure.  As if people routinely go to the expense and discomfort of affixing oversized tattoos whose meanings remain unclear to them on their bare chests?  

Even assuming that absurdity, Platner’s military background made such claims of ignorance simply impossible to credit.  The SS symbol isn’t your everyday skull and crossbones, but a distinctively contorted one that no person would confuse with a pirate flag, for instance.  

Even assuming for the sake of argument that Platner’s excuse possessed a single grain of credibility, however, what does it say about a Senate nominee’s judgment that he’d affix permanent Nazi symbols to himself with such carelessness?  

In any event, we’re now witnessing something too bizarre for fiction.  The same political left that for decades labeled successive Republican figures as Nazis has now nominated a candidate who can fairly be described as a Nazi if the personal symbolism he adopts means anything at all.  

Quite a reversal from the past six decades, during which the label “Nazi” ceased being a meaningful historical descriptor and instead gradually became a lazy slur applied to whichever Republican happened to occupy the state at the moment.  

In 1964, the left portrayed libertarian-leaning Barry Goldwater as some sort of crypto-Nazi extremist who would lead America into authoritarianism and nuclear catastrophe.  Never mind that Goldwater actually possessed Jewish ancestry.  Years later, the same people used Goldwater as a more enlightened example to contrast with Republicans who followed.  

Then came Richard Nixon, whom political opponents cast not merely as wrong or misguided, but as almost evil personified.  That included Nazi comparisons during Nixon’s presidency and aftermath, but once safely removed from political leadership the left’s search for the next “Hitler” inevitably continued.  

Enter Ronald Reagan.  

Throughout Reagan’s presidency, Americans were lectured that he represented a uniquely dangerous Nazi-like threat to freedom, and popular culture depicted him as some sort of warmonger bent on global destruction.  In the end, of course, Reagan departed with soaring approval ratings, the Soviet Union collapsing and America a more prosperous place.  

The kindly George H.W. Bush subsequently couldn’t escape the “Nazi” tales, and his son’s presidency produced perhaps the worst escalation.  Comparisons of George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney to Nazis are too numerous to count, but their opposition to Donald Trump, today’s Hitler, miraculously rehabilitated them in the eyes of the left.  

After Bush, a new fascist threat emerged:  John McCain, a decorated naval aviator who spent years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, was nevertheless shamelessly portrayed as the latest Hitler. 

After McCain came Mitt Romney, whom many Democrats today celebrate as a thoughtful statesman for his opposition to President Trump.  During the 2012 campaign, however, Romney was also slurred as a Nazi.  

One can almost set a stopwatch to this bizarre process of transformation.  The moment that one Republican no longer represents the party, yesterday’s Hitler becomes today’s respectable moderate.  

One needn’t recount the comparisons of President Trump to Hitler, but something interesting happened in 2023 when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis briefly led Trump in 2024 presidential polling.  Namely, The New York Times prematurely rehabilitated Trump by comparing him favorably to the prospective new Republican Hitler, DeSantis.  

You can’t make this up.  

When every leading Republican from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush to McCain to Romney to Trump to DeSantis is portrayed as the reincarnated Hitler, the accusation obviously begins to lose any helpful meaning.  Historical memory becomes cheapened, genuine evil becomes trivialized and legitimate political disagreement becomes moral hysteria.  

And this week, that parade of absurdity reached its punchline.  

After generations of falsely branding Republicans as Nazis, Democrats have nominated a Senate candidate who must now repeatedly explain why he chose to affix the most loathsome Nazi imagery on his own chest.  The party that spent sixty years seeing Nazis behind every Republican face now finds itself defending a candidate whose behavior opens him to the label of actual Nazi.  

As anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment rise, particularly within Platner’s own party, we can only hope that Americans awaken to the legitimately serious threat that this farce masks.