Hard To Kill. Why MAGA's Hit Job On Platner Failed
Posted by Sia on June 11, 2026, 12:33 am ADMIN
Hard To Kill. Why MAGA's Hit Job On Platner Failed
by Rick Wilson - Jun 10
I know a hit job when I read one. I should. I used to build them.
There was a version of me, years back, who could take a candidate’s life, lay it out on a light table, and find the one frame that ruined them. You don’t need the truth. You need a true-enough fragment, a sympathetic reporter, and a Democratic Party so terrified of its own shadow that it does the rest of the work for you. That was the whole game. We didn’t beat Democrats. We handed them a mirror and a magnifying glass and let them disqualify themselves over a flaw, a mistake, a misstep, a college newspaper article, a tweet.
So when the New York Times dropped its long, carefully sorrowful piece on Graham Platner last week, I read it the way a retired safecracker watches a heist movie.
And here’s the thing. The hit fell short. I knew of the woman at its center, and she was
always one of the tribe. She was a Republican operative, a DC MAGA apparatchik who ran Ladies for Brett Kavanaugh. That was always going to sully the attack, and given she was once part of Ali Alexander’s circle of CPAC freaks, I wondered how credulous the Times would be.
Turns out, not as credulous as MAGA hoped.
It fell short because the playbook only works on people who agree to play the victim, and this is a sweeping lesson for Democratic candidates. It fell short because Fifield expected the Times to print her accusations verbatim without giving Platner a chance to respond and offer both a rebuttal and the testimony of other women he’d dated.
The GOP’s entire theory of Democratic candidates rests on one assumption: that the left will be so delicate, so morally fastidious, so desperate to be seen as clean that the faintest smudge on the campaign escutcheon becomes a death sentence. They repurposed Alinsky against Democrats decades ago: make the enemy live up to their own book of rules, because you know they can’t, and you know they’ll flinch first.
It’s a beautiful con, and it only requires one thing to work: cowardice.
They were desperate for the panic to cascade, for Democratic women’s groups and elected officials to run to the microphones for a MeToo 2026 moment. They honestly believe that the media would blindly carry their water because the story was in the New York Times, ignoring that Fifield’s literal job is as a MAGA operative.
Meanwhile, as we’re all painfully aware, the grubby criminal who bragged on tape about grabbing women by the pussy, Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friend, was found determined to be a sexual assaulter in court, and who has consistently cheated on every wife, girlfriend, contract and campaign promise for decades gets a pass from MAGA.
It’s playing out in Texas, with Ken Paxton, the lead clown in a degenerate carnival. None of it split the base. Not one defection. Because MAGA made a separate peace with sin a long time ago, and the deal was explicit. Look at the seemingly endless stream of MAGA pols, pastors, and influencers arrested for sex with minors or possession of child porn.
But it worked with Trump: MAGA bragged to your face: he’s a liar, a cheat, a lowlife bastard, pure scum…but he’s our lowlife bastard.
That’s the trap they laid for us, and it has a back door they never noticed.
Now, Platner is a flawed man who has done stupid shit.
Let me be precise about what I mean, because the word has gone soft from overuse. I don’t mean he’s a saint with an asterisk. I mean he is a man who has lived enough life to have a past with weight to it, and who, when the past arrived in 30-point type, did not hide behind a crisis-comms firm and a statement built entirely written in the passive voice. He stood in the daylight and said: that was me, here’s who I am now, judge the distance. He called out the lies, owned the truths, and showed us the man he is today.
Last night, Mainers decided that Platner may be an asshole, but he’s their asshole.
There is a kind of manhood that has gone nearly extinct in our politics. Not the chest-beating performative kind, not Trump’s glistening, made-up sneer, not the tactical-beard-bro candidate caught in a lie at the podium.
The real kind. The kind that opens the ledger. That says “I did things I’m not proud of and I am not going to launder them.” Accountability without surrender. That is harder, and rarer, and frankly more masculine than anything the Andrew Tate caucus has ever managed.
Because people are flawed. People do stupid, reckless, regrettable things. People fail to live up to their own standards, which is the universal human condition and not a partisan one. Lord knows, my sins travel with me every day, and because of the damnable permanence in the architecture of my memory, I consider them more than I want.
Candidates aren’t drawn from the Aaron Sorkin fantasy pool, regardless of how much we wish they were. The question was never whether any single candidate carries damage, including self-induced damage. The question is whether they carried it somewhere, learned something, and came back able to serve because of it rather than in spite of it. I like to think I have. I think we all do.
But if Platner is a profile in personal courage in admitting things his advisors likely thought would kill his campaign, what can be said of Susan Collins?
Nothing good, that’s what.
She’s played the people of Maine, and her main constituency - the national political media - like a fiddle; she’s concerned and so votes no on the first bill supporting Trump’s policies, but yes thereafter. She clutches her pearls on his nominees, then only votes against them if she’s one of a dozen GOP no votes. She’s the fake orgasm of moderate politics; unconvincing except to the inexperience.
Don’t underestimate her political determination to hold on to power. She’s spent the week talking about Platner’s moral failings in his personal life, hoping to distract from the moral failings that define her public one.
What won’t Graham Platner do?
He won’t kneel to Trump. He won’t rubber-stamp the judges, and Trump Supreme Court picks engineered to rig the deck against the country for a generation. He won’t go quietly along with Thune and Johnson in exchange for an appropriation here and a pat on the head there.
He will be, of all the endangered species in Washington, an actual no vote when a no vote matters.
Working-class Maine is the real Maine. The boatyards, the night shifts, the people doing the hard math on the family budget at the kitchen table in January. Platner knows them because he is one of them. Collins stopped knowing them somewhere around her second term, around the time “I’m concerned” and “pearl clutching” became a gag.
She is hard to beat. I won’t pretend otherwise. But her clucking about Platner’s personal life doesn’t begin to offset the grim arithmetic she’s responsible for. Mainers are hurting, and she has empowered the man causing it at every single step, then furrowed her brow about it afterward, every time, on schedule.
The hit job assumed we’d flinch. Turns out the flaw in the plan was the same flaw it’s always been. They forgot what a man looks like when he refuses to apologize for being human, and instead apologizes only for what actually warrants it.
on June 11, 2026, 12:33 am
