Allegedly abusive lefty Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner wasn’t just rough on his ex-girlfriends and sexting behind his wife’s back — he was also an “a-hole extraordinaire” as a bartender.
Platner, who faced a firestorm this week as he tries to unseat longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins and help the Democrats win the Senate majority, was a deeply unpleasant barkeep at Washington DC’s Tune Inn, one regular claimed.
“Platner was just kind of dark, you’d try to turn up a little conversation, and he wouldn’t give anything back, no smile, no acknowledgement. Just nothing coming back that was friendly and warm,” said Wayne Laugesen, an independent journalist and strategic communications and policy consultant.
“He just seemed like a troubled, dark, unfriendly, unhappy person.”
Platner, 41, who also been accused of lying about his Nazi tattoo, worked at The Tune Inn for at least five years when he lived in Washington between 2011 and 2016.
He bartended at the popular Pennsylvania Avenue dive when he returned from a tour in Afghanistan as a Marine in 2011, while he was in his late twenties to early thirties.
It was in those years that Platner’s heavy drinking led to a DUI arrest and 2011 conviction that saw his driving license suspended for a year.
“He just sort of resented being there,” said Laugesen, a former editorial page editor for the Denver Gazette and Colorado Springs Gazette. “If you asked him for a beer or a cheeseburger, it was a bother to him. He just sort of rubbed me the wrong way.”
Laugesen, who at the time lived three blocks from the Tune Inn, said Platner was so disagreeable that he and his wife eventually took their business to the Hawk N Dove next door whenever they saw Platner behind the bar.
Platner, who would hang at the Tune Inn when he wasn’t on shift, often took his shirt off while drinking late at night, according to public accounts.
In 2012, he even bragged about the skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest — widely recognized as the “death’s head” symbol for the infamous Nazi SS death squads.
“He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” a former acquaintance told Jewish Insider in October, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He said it in a cutesy little way.”
Platner denied allegations this week that he’d been physical with an ex-girlfriend and once locked her in a bedroom.
The embattled Platner, who’s made a slew of racist comments in since-deleted online posts, also once trashed black people for not tipping.
Responding to a 2013 Reddit post titled “What is one question you have always wanted to ask someone of another race,” he asked, “Why don’t black people tip?”
“I work as a bartender and it always amazes me how solid this stereotype is,” he wrote. “Every now and again a black patron will leave a 15-20% tip, but usually it’s between 0-5%. There’s got to be a reason behind it, what is it?” he wrote, according to the Bangor Daily News.
But the Tune Inn might have also been what set up Platner for his US Senate run.
The drinking hole was especially popular with Capitol Hill staffers and political journalists. It was there Platner became friends with Ryan Grim, the former HuffPost DC bureau chief.
Grim, who founded Drop Site News in 2024, was one of Platner’s early national interviews last year, helping to amplify his working-class narrative despite Platner’s wealthy upbringing, as he recounted how the oyster farmer was his bartender almost every Sunday at the Tune Inn.
It was in his bartending years that Platner, an army veteran, began struggling with PTSD, according to his campaign. He was taking classes at George Washington University, but hasn’t publicly disclosed his major, and dropped out in 2016 to move back to Maine.
His campaign did not return The Post’s request for comment.