The Left is not united. They’re starting to attack each other.
And now Democrat Senator turns on is own party after they made this huge mistake.
He’s Not Pulling His Punches. And Democrats Are Furious That He Isn’t.
John Fetterman has been saying difficult things about his own party for as long as he has been in national politics. He does not appear to be stopping anytime soon. And on the subject of Graham Platner, he is apparently just getting started.
On Thursday, the Pennsylvania senator escalated his already blistering public criticism of the Maine Democratic Senate candidate with a challenge that landed somewhere between principled demand and performance art. “Let me make a deal,” Fetterman said. “I’ll tell [Platner] I’ll wear a suit every day, if he releases all those texts and messages that he’s had … [with] the dozen women.”
The offer is an only-Fetterman construction — the man who has made his refusal to wear a suit a minor point of political identity proposing to abandon it in exchange for transparency about alleged extramarital sexting with multiple women on a platform called Kik. But the substance of the challenge is real, and the Democratic Party’s collective failure to make a similar demand is the story.
Fetterman’s full critique of Platner has by now grown into one of the most comprehensive public takedowns of a candidate by a member of his own party in modern Senate history. “I think you shouldn’t send, you know, sexually explicit texts or d— pics or whatever he sends to all these women on Kik,” Fetterman said earlier in the week on CNN. “What kind of a creep? What kind of a creeper has been on … a platform like Kik, and send a dozen explicit kinds of messages and who knows what else?”
He did not stop there. “Here is a guy that describes an American soldier, a Purple Heart [recipient], a dumb motherf—– that doesn’t deserve to live,” Fetterman said, referencing another of the many Platner controversies. “This is a guy that had a problem with me, how I dress, but he seemed to have no problem posing in a towel at a disgusting website that consistently had serious problems about that kinds of depravity.”
The Swalwell Comparison — And Why It Stings
The line that landed hardest was Fetterman’s invocation of Eric Swalwell — the disgraced ex-congressman who resigned from Congress in April amid multiple sexual assault allegations, and whose campaign has since been revealed to have paid more than $313,000 to the attorney publicly defending him against those allegations.
“I’m saying that the last time Democrats leaned in on a guy that was sending, you know, [these] kinds of messages to women, I think that was like Swalwell, you know,” Fetterman said. “I don’t know, that’s not someone I’m never gonna carry water for.”
The parallel is pointed. Platner sent explicit messages to multiple women while married. Swalwell is alleged to have sexually assaulted women who worked for him. Both cases were met, in the first instance, by Democratic institutional support predicated on electoral necessity. In Swalwell’s case, that support evaporated only when the allegations became impossible to ignore and the polling collapsed. In Platner’s case, the institutional support — from Bernie Sanders, from Sheldon Whitehouse, from the DSCC — is still largely intact, even as the story keeps growing.
Fetterman’s position is that the party made a catastrophic mistake with Swalwell, is making the same mistake with Platner, and that the voters of Maine — and the rest of the country — deserve someone better than this from a party that spent years demanding accountability from Republicans over far less.
The Party’s Response — And What It Reveals
The reaction from Democrats has been, predictably, furious. Many inside the party have accused Fetterman of prioritizing his own brand over the electoral stakes of the Maine race. They argue that Collins is beatable, that the window is closing, and that publicly torching the nominee is a gift to the Republicans.
Those arguments are the arguments of a party that has decided electoral necessity trumps institutional integrity — and keeps being surprised when voters notice. The polls in Maine, as of the most recent survey, show Platner trailing Collins by nine points after leading by a similar margin before the scandals broke. The candidate the party insists is their best option is now behind in a race they had considered winnable.
Fetterman’s challenge stands. “He has [said] so many offensive things that it’s hard to keep up with it,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “I mean, what’s next?” Release the messages, wear a suit, find out. The Democratic Party has so far declined to ask. Fetterman is asking for them.
