involved. It should not become a substitute for evidence. Listening, scrutiny, and judgment are different steps.
Other democracies draw these lines differently. Hollande refused to discuss an affair publicly and returned attention to governing.¹⁰ Japan's Yuichiro Tamaki admitted an extramarital affair in 2024, apologized, and kept his party's unanimous support.¹¹ Germany restricts Nazi-linked symbols under criminal law.¹² Britain's Matt Hancock was finished not by the affair but by breaking his own Covid guidance while enforcing it on everyone else — the hypocrisy, not the sex, was the offense.¹³
Scandal is cultural judgment. The culture doing the judging should know its own biases.
A useful standard: does the conduct reveal coercion, abuse, exploitation, continuing dishonesty, hypocrisy central to the candidate's public message, misuse of office, or unfitness for power? Consensual messages may be painful without belonging to the electorate. A suspicious tattoo may be offensive without proving ideology. A disputed allegation may warrant scrutiny without becoming fact.
The same standard should apply to Collins, to Trump, to the party Platner is trying to unseat. Reuters reported that Trump-family crypto ventures generated more than $800 million in sales in the first half of 2025 alone.¹⁴ AP has reported on financial arrangements benefiting Trump, his relatives, and allies — including unresolved questions about IRS audit protections.¹⁵ A candidate's extramarital texts may tell voters something about character. A family cashing in on the presidency tells voters something about power. Treating them as interchangeable is how accountability disappears.
Underneath the Platner controversy is a question about what a republic actually needs to function.
A democracy that can only process character through revelation — the screenshot, the diary entry, the ex-girlfriend on cable news — has surrendered the harder work: tracking promises, following money, demanding proportion. That work requires citizens to stay interested in things deliberately made boring, and institutions willing to cover them anyway.
The founders worried about factions and demagogues and the corruption of public virtue. They did not anticipate the news cycle. But they understood something it tends to forget: private conduct and public trust are not the same standard. Confusing them is not a small error. It's how republics get quietly hollowed out while everyone is watching the wrong thing.
Back in Split, a young Marine made a stupid and possibly ignorant decision in a bar. That moment is now doing political work it was never meant to do. Maybe what it reveals matters. Maybe it doesn't. The uncertainty is not a reason to stop asking.
It's a reason to make sure we're asking the right question — and that we're asking it of everyone.
Bibliography
1. Rachael Sollenberger, "Republican Unveils Plan to Serve Until She's 80 in Cringe Video," The Daily Beast, February 10, 2026.
2. Susan Jones, "After Telling Susan Collins That Roe Was 'Settled Law,' Brett Kavanaugh Calls It Wrongly Decided," Maine Public, June 24, 2022.
3. Colin Woodard, "Defense Contractor Pleads Guilty to Making Illegal Contributions to Sen. Collins' 2020 Campaign," Portland Press Herald, September 28, 2022.
4. Anti-Defamation League, "Totenkopf," Hate Symbols Database, adl.org.
5. Susan Loftus and Bill Kobin, "Video Shows Graham Platner with 'Troubling' Tattoo That Appears to Be a Nazi Symbol," The Maine Monitor / Bangor Daily News, October 21, 2025.