Whoopi Goldberg suggests Democrat candidate with Nazi tattoo may have just drank too much

“The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg suggested on Thursday that Democratic Maine senate candidate Graham Platner, who had a Nazi tattoo on his chest, may have just made some mistakes by drinking too much.

Platner said that he got the tattoo, as skull-and-crossbones image, while drunk 18 years ago before he knew it had a Nazi association. Goldberg said that she had also made mistakes while she was drunk and that he may have not had Nazi viewpoints at all, which led to some pushback from her fellow co-hosts.

“I’m sorry, when I was drinking, strange stuff came out of my mouth. Well you know what? Nothing like that to us now, but to people then it would’ve sounded,” Goldberg began, leading Joy Behar to tell her she never said racist things while drunk. “You don’t know that. Listen, I’m simply saying I can’t tell you that when I used to get drunk, I didn’t do stupid stuff. But what I can tell you is, that I know I drank and did stupid stuff and I took accountability for it.”

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The other co-hosts believed that Platner went too far and that being intoxicated is not an excuse.

In an Instagram post made by Platner on Wednesday, the candidate said that he got another tattoo to cover the Nazi-associated one and said he was “appalled” to learn that it resembled a Nazi symbol. The new tattoo is a Celtic knot with imagery of dogs.

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders doubled down on his endorsement of Platner by telling Axios that there are more important issues than his tattoo.

Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, told The New York Times that the symbol on Platner’s chest was one of the best known Nazi symbols other than the swastika. Guards at Nazi concentration camps wore the symbol, known as the Totenkopf, on their caps and that it is associated with the Third Reich.

Platner has also come under scrutiny for his Reddit posts where he urged violence as a means of social change. Other Reddit posts downplayed sexual assault in the military, made derogatory remarks about gay men and criticized the police and white Americans in rural areas.

Genevieve McDonald, the now-former political director for Platner, resigned after his old Reddit posts emerged, The Bangor Daily News reported. Platner said on “Pod Save America” he was “utterly horrified by” some of his words in the Reddit posts, and that he wrote these things while he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder following his military service.

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