Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.

Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”

“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”

In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”

He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”

“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”

“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”

“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.

“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”

Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”

Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.

Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.

pic.twitter.com/9itIt4Mw25

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026

President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.

“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”

The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”

Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”

TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”

Critics blasted Trump.

“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.

One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”

Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”

The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”

Image via Reuters 

MS NOW spoke with a small but growing group of former Trump supporters who have left the MAGA movement. They reveal the depths of their experience and, in some cases, their lack of knowledge about basic events — like the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I was as deep as anyone could have been,” Rich Logis, founder and CEO of Leaving MAGA, told MS NOW’s David Noriega. “I was an aspiring MAGA pundit. I had bylines in places like Fox and The Federalist. I spoke at Trump groups, I was a donor on the campaign. I was unapologetically a MAGA and Trump supporter.”

MS NOW says Leaving MAGA is “a nonprofit for those disillusioned by the movement.”

“I really wanted acceptance with my father, and my father was very much into Fox News, so that was something that we would connect on,” another Leaving MAGA member told MS NOW.

One said that she had become “heavily indoctrinated into trad wife culture.”

“We were all absolutely fine with household voting,” she said, declaring that Trump’s SAVE America Act bill “is to take that right [to vote] away from women.”

Another explained that she met her “husband in 2021, and they made me watch a documentary on January 6th, and I didn’t even know what happened on January 6th prior to the PBS documentary.”

“And I looked at him, and I said, ‘Scott, did that really happen?’ And he was like, ‘Where have you been?'”

Noriega says that Trump voters diversifying their news sources had a lot to do with their exit from MAGA.

“You know,” another explained, “I had believed that when Trump ran, that he would be somebody who would be different as an outsider. I think that he was correct in pointing out a lot of the flaws of our political system. It just turned out, unfortunately, that he didn’t try to solve those or remedy those ills, that he exacerbated them.”

One agreed when Noriega told them that, “Hearing you guys talk about MAGA and about supporting Trump, it sounds like you’re talking often about, like, a cult that’s damaged.”

“What MAGA does provide is a place where people feel seen and heard and validated,” one told MS NOW. “We used to say, ‘We’re not in the cult, the outside world is the cult, and we’re not the crazies, the outside world are the crazies.'”

Another explained that when he left MAGA, he “kicked the door open and jumped through.”

“I had a heart full of hate, so I would just go on the offensive and attack anybody and everybody that still supported it. And I learned over time that that’s not gonna change anybody. In fact, it’s gonna push people over. So I’ve learned to be that empathy, that voice of concern, the caring voice. ‘You can do this. I did it,'” he said.