Politics
Our political journalists are based in the Maine State House and have deep source networks across the partisan spectrum in communities all over the state. Their coverage aims to cut through major debates and probe how officials make decisions. Read more Politics coverage here.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner isn’t ruling out meeting with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson after the part-time Mainer told an interviewer he planned on meeting the state’s rising progressive star.
Carlson’s public split with President Donald Trump over the Iran war has been the main subject of a recent battery of interviews, including one with the BBC in which the pundit called the president a “slave” to Israel and its U.S. backers. More than 6,000 people have been killed in the conflict, which has been under a tenuous ceasefire for more than three weeks.
In a New York Times interview at Carlson’s home in the western Maine village of Bryant Pond, he praised Platner’s opposition to the war and said he planned on meeting him. The candidate responded by telling progressive journalist David Sirota that he was “struggling” with the question of meeting with Carlson and did not yet have an answer.
He said he was torn between the strategic value of reaching large and diverse audiences and the ethical risk of lending legitimacy to hosts who traffic in racism, antisemitism and other extremist views. But Carlson’s moral opposition to the Iran war goes further than the positions cited so far by many Democratic politicians, Platner said Sunday.
“Are we exposing new people to Tucker Carlson, or are we exposing people that listen to Tucker Carlson to us?” he said. “That’s, I think, the math equation that needs to be made.”
Platner, a military veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, called the war “un-American” days after it began, often repeating that Trump was using it as a distraction from the release of files related to the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. He has criticized Democrats for criticizing Trump over his authority to wage that war rather than on moral grounds.
Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the Democratic U.S. Senate primary last week, making Platner the party’s presumptive nominee, although longshot candidate David Costello of Brunswick is still running for the right to face five-term Republican Susan Collins in November.
Collins voted against initial Democratic attempts to limit Trump’s war powers, although she broke with her party on that issue last week. She criticized the Republican president for “incendiary language” following his early April declaration that “a whole civilization” could be wiped out if Iran did not accede to his demands over reopening the crucial Strait of Hormuz.
Trump responded to earlier criticism from Carlson and other conservative opponents of the war as “low IQ” people. In a podcast exchange with his brother last month, Carlson said he regretted backing Trump and said he was “tormented by it.”
