Platner says allegations of physical abuse of former partner ‘are simply not true’
During a live interview with MS NOW on Thursday, Graham Platner flatly denied having ever been physically abusive to a former romantic partner, as she alleged to the New York Times.
The Maine Senate candidate made the denial to Chris Hayes after the host read him the published allegations from Lyndsey Fifield, who claimed that, during one argument, he “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side”. On another occasion, she told the paper, he “yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument”.
Platner said that neither of those incidents took place and suggested that Fifield, a Republican political operative, was lying to damage his campaign.
“There are some allegations in this piece that are simply not true. Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of somebody politically motivated,” Platner said. “That is not true.”
Platner also said that Fifield was lying when she said that he knew that the skull-and-crossbones tattoo he got in 2007 was a Nazi symbol, used by the SS.
Asked about his former partner’s claim that he did know what the tattoo was, Platner said: “No, I did not.”
He pointed out that he had taken his shirt off, clearly displaying the tattoo, at his brother’s wedding to a Jewish woman, which he would not ahve done had he known of the Nazi associations.
He also suggested that Fifield was likely the source of earlier reports that he knew the meaning of the tattoo. “She’s the person who’s been telling people this from the beginning, and I feel like, you know, we’re kind of rehashing the thing we’ve been through,” he said.
He also declined to speculate on the authenticity of a screenshot Fifield showed to the Times which she said was text message she sent to friends in August 2025 saying that he had “a Nazi tattoo”.
“I certainly didn’t know,” Platner said.
When Hayes asked Platner to comment on reports last week that his wife found sexual messages to other women on his phone last year, Platner declined to say how recently the messages were sent and asked for somer privacy in his marriage.
“At the beginning of our marriage, I made mistakes, and Amy helped me be accountable for them, and we worked through them, and the work that we did made our marriage significantly stronger, and who we are today is an incredibly faithful and happy married couple,” he said.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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Senate Republicans scuttled an attempt by Democrats to stop Donald Trump from creating a $1.8bn fund to pay his allies, even as signs emerged that dissent over the proposal was spreading inside the US president’s own party.
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Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner flatly denied allegations to the New York Times from a former romantic partner that he had been physically abusive.
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In a remarkable split-screen for Democrats, as their candidate in the Maine Senate race, Graham Platner, is asking voters to overlook his past conduct, their candidate in the Texas Senate race, James Talarico, is trying to disqualify his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, for his past conduct.
Amid war and economic anxiety, Trump announces plans to remodel the Lincoln Memorial, adding his name to a new promenade
During his near-daily appearance before the cameras in the Oval Office on Thursday, Donald Trump spent little time addressing the crises facing Americans, a war with Iran he started but can’t seem to end, and the rising cost of living his economic and foreign policy choices have exacerbated.
Instead, the US president returned again and again to his obsession with building and refurbishing monuments in the nation’s capital, Washington DC.
As he had the day before, the president proudly held up a large chart he had commissioned, showing that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool he is having resurfaced would be the tallest building in the nation, if it was a building instead of a pool, and was vertical instead of horizontal. The president did not mention, and was not asked about, the obvious error on the chart (it has an X-axis scale that shows a 1,000ft interval and a 500ft interval being the same).
Later in his rambling monologue, the president announced what he called “breaking. news”: his plan to build a new walkway to “extend” the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac River.
“We’re going to call it the promenade”, Trump told reporters. “They want to call it the Trump Promenade, but I don’t know if I want to do that. But it’s going to be beautiful. It’s a beautiful project, and it’s going to take the Lincoln Memorial right down to the Potomac.”
The president did not say who the “they” is pushing him to name the new walkway after himself, but his intention to add his name to an extension of the Lincoln Memorial comes just days after a court ordered him to remove his name from the exterior of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to that president.
During his announcement, Trump also suggested that the memorial to Lincoln was for some reason constructed back to front. “At the Lincoln Memorial, the front was supposed to be the back, and the back was supposed to be the front.”
As Maine Democrats hope voters overlook Graham Platner’s conduct, James Talarico tells Texans a real man ‘does what’s right even when no one is watching’
In a remarkable split-screen for Democrats, as their candidate in the Maine Senate race, Graham Platner, is asking voters to overlook his past conduct, their candidate in the Texas Senate race, James Talarico, is trying to disqualify his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, for his past conduct.
“There’s been a lot of talk in this campaign about what it means to be ‘a real man’”, Talarico said in remarks posted on social media on Thursday.
The Texas state representative and Presbyterian seminarian was referring to attacks from Republicans, including Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general of Texas, who falsely accused him of being vegan, which they cast as the opposite of a sufficiently macho Texan.
Talarico then spoke in praise of the quiet, manly virtues of his adoptive step-father, “the man who gave me his last name, the man who raised me as his own.”
“Every Saturday morning, my dad would mow our lawn. And then, without anyone asking him, he would go next door and mow our neighbor’s lawn, because she was elderly and a widow. He never talked about it. He just did it. Because that’s what a man does,” Talarico told his supporters.
“Call me old-fashioned, but a man takes responsibility. He upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors, and he does what’s right, even when no one is watching,” Talarico said.
“Here’s what real men don’t do” he went on. “They don’t lie, and cheat their way through life.”
“Real men serve others”, Talarcio concluded. “Weak men serve themselves.”
Graham Platner supporter Bernie Sanders refuses to comment on new allegations
Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who was an early supporter of Graham Platner’s candidacy for the US Senate, repeatedly declined on Thursday to comment on the allegations of abuse a former romantic partner made to the New York Times.
Igor Bobic of NOTUS reports Sanders, “walking out of the Capitol with a slice of pizza in hand, says he hasn’t read the latest NYT story on Graham Platner and declines to comment”.
Earlier in the day, before the Times article was published, but as rumors about its contents swirled in Washington, a reporter for the conservative Washington Examiner asked Sanders if he was concerned that “sexual assault allegations could come out on Graham Platner”, the senator asked, “Who are you with?”
When the reporter, Ramsey Touchberry, replied, “the Examiner”, Sanders said: “Why don’t we examine income and wealth inequality?”
“I’m sure he’s not a saint”, Sanders told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday, after previous reporting on Platner’s wife finding sexual messages to other women on his phone last year.
“He went through some very bloody and horrible situations” Sanders added, referrign to Platner’s time fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. “He has acknowledged that he came back with PTSD. He’s had his share of problems.”
The senator also pointed to what Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, said in a video message shared by his campaign.
“She is standing by her husband, and I think it’s better for this country that we start focusing on the enormous crises facing working people, a corrupt political system, than spending so much time worrying about, you know, the personal life of an individual”, Sanders said.
Platner says allegations of physical abuse of former partner ‘are simply not true’
During a live interview with MS NOW on Thursday, Graham Platner flatly denied having ever been physically abusive to a former romantic partner, as she alleged to the New York Times.
The Maine Senate candidate made the denial to Chris Hayes after the host read him the published allegations from Lyndsey Fifield, who claimed that, during one argument, he “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side”. On another occasion, she told the paper, he “yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument”.
Platner said that neither of those incidents took place and suggested that Fifield, a Republican political operative, was lying to damage his campaign.
“There are some allegations in this piece that are simply not true. Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of somebody politically motivated,” Platner said. “That is not true.”
Platner also said that Fifield was lying when she said that he knew that the skull-and-crossbones tattoo he got in 2007 was a Nazi symbol, used by the SS.
Asked about his former partner’s claim that he did know what the tattoo was, Platner said: “No, I did not.”
He pointed out that he had taken his shirt off, clearly displaying the tattoo, at his brother’s wedding to a Jewish woman, which he would not ahve done had he known of the Nazi associations.
He also suggested that Fifield was likely the source of earlier reports that he knew the meaning of the tattoo. “She’s the person who’s been telling people this from the beginning, and I feel like, you know, we’re kind of rehashing the thing we’ve been through,” he said.
He also declined to speculate on the authenticity of a screenshot Fifield showed to the Times which she said was text message she sent to friends in August 2025 saying that he had “a Nazi tattoo”.
“I certainly didn’t know,” Platner said.
When Hayes asked Platner to comment on reports last week that his wife found sexual messages to other women on his phone last year, Platner declined to say how recently the messages were sent and asked for somer privacy in his marriage.
“At the beginning of our marriage, I made mistakes, and Amy helped me be accountable for them, and we worked through them, and the work that we did made our marriage significantly stronger, and who we are today is an incredibly faithful and happy married couple,” he said.
Platner accuser works with Republican women’s group that boasted of writing talking points for Susan Collins to support Brett Kavanaugh
Supporters of Graham Platner, the Maine Democrat challenging Republican Susan Collins for a seat in the US Senate, are drawing attention to the fact that a woman who told the New York Times he was physically abusive to her during two arguments when they dated, between 2013 and 2015, works with a Republican group that has supported Collins.
According to the Times, Platner’s former romantic partner, Lyndsey Fifield, alleged that, during one argument, he “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side”. On another occasion, she told the paper, he “yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument”.
Platner’s campaign told the Times he “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, and described Fifield as “a lifelong G.O.P. operative”.
Fifield was a social media manager at the nonprofit Hiring Our Heroes, which helps veterans get employment, when she started dating Platner, himself a veteran, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She then spent nearly seven years as a social media manager for the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing think tank that was later known as the driving force behind Project 2025, the blueprint for the second Trump administration.
After working on Nikki Haley’s Republican presidential campaign, Fifield has spent the past three years as a fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group.
The scope of Fifield’s work for the Independent Women’s Forum is not clear, but, as the journalist Ryan Grim noted on Thursday, that group’s chair, Heather Higgins, is on record boasting about the role the forum played in writing talking points used by Susan Collins to support of the confirmation of of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court despite sexual assault allegations.
Speaking in 2020 at the Leadership Institute, a conservative professional network, Higgins said that she was “extraordinarily proud” of IWF’s work in support of the Kavanaugh’s confirmation after his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, testified in the Senate.
“We were approached and they said, ‘Can you tell us how to talk about supporting Kavanaugh without alienating the Me Too movement?’ We wrote a memo, it was used by a lot of members of the Senate and the House and Fox News and elsewhere. But most important is, Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she could not have seen how to support him,” Higgins said.
“And if you look at her speech that she gave on the Senate floor, it is entirely the playing put and architecture of how we said to structure the argument and what to say and how to say it, which is just so gratifying. We were watching TV saying ‘That’s ours!’”
Trump confirms plan to replace Freedom 250 concert series with ‘A Rally to end all Rallies’, featuring himself
Donald Trump confirmed on Thursday that the troubled Freedom 250 concert series, in honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary, is off, and will be replaced by what he called “A Rally to end all Rallies”, featuring himself.
Writing on his social media platform, Trump announced the rally, with a prominent dig at the many musical artists who dropped out of the concert series last week when they realized it would be closely associated with him.
“We don’t want singers with no talent, but big fees to put you to sleep, we’ve told them all to stay home,” Trump wrote. “All we want is you, me, a few speakers, and the Greatest Music ever played, the same Music you have listened to for years!”
The president then explained that the featured musical performers would be two of the same artists who regularly perform at his rallies: “Lee Greenwood introducing me with what has turned out to be one of the Greatest Hits of All Time, GOD BLESS THE U.S.A., and the amazing Christopher Macchio, who will sing Nessun Dorma, Hallelujah, Ave Maria, God Bless America, and others”.
The rally will also feature musical performers from the US military, the president said, “PLUS a fine and highly dignified gentleman known as, President DONALD J. TRUMP!”
Republican National Committee calls claims of woman who dated Platner ‘deeply disturbing’
The Republican National Committee, which perhaps planned for a more explosive report on Graham Platner’s treatment of his former romantic partners than than the New York Times actually delivered on Thursday, sent a statement to reporters with the deeply misleading claim that the article reveals that “Graham Platner abused and kidnapped women”.
That characterization appears to be based on the account of one woman who dated Platner between 2013 and 2015, a Republican campaign operative who alleged that, during one argument, Platner “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm’”.
A spokeswoman for the RNC, Delanie Bomar, said in a statement:
“Every day brings another deeply disturbing revelation about Graham Platner. If he’s willing to do this to his own girlfriend, imagine what he’s willing to do in a position of political power. Maine voters deserve to know why Democrats are willing to excuse this deranged behavior. If Chuck Schumer and national Democrats don’t distance themselves from Platner, they’ll be forced to answer for his behavior every day from now until Election Day.”
Platner’s campaign said in a statement to the Times that he “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations.
Three women who dated Graham Platner describe toxic relationships; one claims he knew then his tattoo was Nazi symbol – report
The New York Times reports that three of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s former romantic partners described volatile and “toxic” relationships to reporter in conversations over the past two months.
While other former romantic partners described Platner in a flattering light to the newspaper, and said they felt safe with him, one of the three women with bad memories, a Republican campaign operative Platner dated from 2013-2015, claimed that he was physically abusive to her during two arguments.
Platner’s campaign said in a statement to the Times that he “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations.
The same woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who worked for the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing think-tank that produced Project 2025, and on Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign, told the Times that Platner knew then that the skull-and-crossbones tattoo he got on his chest in 2007 was a Nazi symbol.
Platner told Politico in October that he only “realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol” after he launched his campaign last year and “reporters and D.C. insiders” made him aware that it looked like the skull-and-crossbones members of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or SS, called a Totenkopf.
Fifield, however, told the Times Platner called it “my Totenkopf” more than a decade ago when they dated. “He would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo”, she said.
Fifield also showed the Times a screenshot of a private chat group from last summer in which she said she told friends that Platner “has a Nazi tattoo on his chest.”
“I will personally go campaign for Collins,” she wrote, in reference to Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican senator Platner is running to unseat.
In a statement to the Times, Platner’s campaign said: “Let’s be very clear: This is a lifelong G.O.P. operative who’s dedicated her career to electing Republicans.”
Trump says housing official Bill Pulte does not need national security experience to be intelligence director
At an Oval Office event supposedly about coal production that began an hour ago and is still going, Donald Trump began by focusing, again, on his many building and renovation projects in Washington DC, and is now repeating many of his familiar false claims on a variety of subjects in response to reporter questions.
At one stage, the former Fox News radio correspondent Jon Decker asked the president about opposition even among Republicans to his choice of Bill Pulte, the top federal housing official, to serve as acting director of national intelligence after Tulsi Gabbard leaves at the end of the month.
Asked why he picked Pulte, the president first called his pick, who was ousted from the board of his family’s construction firm Pulte Homes in 2020, a man of “high integrity”.
Trump then hinted at what might be closer to the real reason he is installing Pulte to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies. “He’s a very smart guy and he may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump said. “I think he’d like to do it.”
Before her decision to resign, Gabbard made a mysterious appearance at a raid by the FBI on an election center in Georgia, apparently as part of an effort to pursue conspiracy theories Trump turned to to explain away his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
When Decker followed up to ask if Pulte has “the necessary national security experience to take on that position”, Trump pointed out that Pulte had the same total lack of experience with national security as he did when he was elected president in 2016.
“I do”, Trump said. “And I think he does actually, because he’s smart. Because a lot of national security- look, I wasn’t greatly experienced in national security, and I think I’ve done a really great job with it.”
Oliver Milman
Per my last post, Trump is using a wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he calls “beautiful clean coal” despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.
The president is using the Defense Production Act, a cold war-era statute used to accelerate American industrial output in times of national need, to provide grants to more than a dozen existing coal plants across the US, including facilities capable of exporting coal.
The president has long been a champion of reviving the US’s ailing coal industry, with today’s White House event featuring supportive governors and lawmakers from coal-rich states such as Wyoming and West Virginia.
In the past year, the Trump administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to the coal industry, signed orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra for ageing plants to stay open and dismantled environmental rules that limit toxins from coal leaching into Americans’ shared air and water.
Regardless of Trump’s characterization of coal as “clean, beautiful”, the reality is that coal is not clean. It is the most carbon-dense fossil fuel and therefore a leading cause of the climate crisis when burned. Coal also gives off tiny toxic particles that sicken miners and trigger widespread respiratory and heart health problems across the US – research has estimated that as many as 460,000 deaths in the US from 1999 to 2020 were attributable to air pollution from coal plants alone.
Environmental groups strongly criticized the administration’s latest aid for coal. “It is disgusting and reprehensible that the president of the United States is giving away our taxpayer dollars to deadly and expensive coal plants that will make Americans sicker and drive up electricity prices even more,” said Patrick Drupp, climate policy director of the Sierra Club.
“This handout betrays everything Donald Trump promised and only serves his big coal buddies who stroke his ego and hand him shiny trophies.”
Read Oliver’s full report here:
