Rupture and Repair: When Problematic Figures Ask For Our Support

Hunter Biden and Graham Platner are asking us to reckon with who they were. Pete Hegseth and Ken Paxton are asking us to look past it.

LEFT: Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images. RIGHT: U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

On Tuesday night, Maine Democrats answered a question they’d been carrying for weeks. Graham Platner, an oyster farmer, combat veteran and progressive insurgent, won his party’s Senate primary with a commanding 72 percent of the vote. The AP called the race 90 minutes after polls closed with just 11 percent of precincts reporting.

Democrats nationwide exhaled on Tuesday. In the weeks leading up to the primary, Platner had apologized for old posts on Reddit where he had minimized the experiences of sexual assault survivors and denigrated the LGBTQ+ community. He admitted to covering up a tattoo on his chest bearing a widely recognized Nazi symbol that he said he acquired during a night of drinking with fellow Marines in Croatia in 2007.

But the headlines kept coming. The New York Times reported that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with multiple women while married. Former romantic partners described his behavior as volatile and physically intimidating. And his own former political director published an op-ed on the eve of the primary arguing he should not be a United States senator.

Maine Democrats, having absorbed all of it, still gave him nearly three out of every four votes cast.

Platner’s acceptance speech, delivered in Blue Hill, the rural Maine town where he was born, captured the nature of his broad support and the political gauntlet he had walked. “I’ve made mistakes in my life,” he told the crowd, “mistakes that I regret, that I live with and that I continue to learn from. I’m still far from perfect, but every day, I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than I was the day before.” Then: “If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change. And the reason I believe that is because I have lived it.”

With those words, Platner invited voters to take their ruptured trust and work with him to repair it. He opened his life’s ledger and asked the electorate to weigh whether the distance he has traveled since his worst moments is real. It came off as a raw and honest moment. But it was also a politically shrewd one.

Platner is not alone in testing our willingness to separate a person’s past from their fitness to lead, serve or simply be welcomed back into public life. Several figures from both sides of the political spectrum have raised this very question. Some seek redemption for conduct they acknowledge. Others seek power for conduct they deny. The distance between those two postures turns out to matter enormously, even when the underlying behavior looks similar on the surface.

The wayward son

For years, Hunter Biden was the ready punching bag for Republicans who wanted to tarnish the image of his father and to damage Democrats more broadly. They amplified his addiction, his playboy lifestyle, his financial recklessness and especially his willingness to trade on his father’s name. It all served as shorthand for Democratic hypocrisy.

The most serious allegation—that Joe and Hunter Biden each accepted $5 million in bribes from Burisma—was fabricated by a former FBI informant who pleaded guilty to lying to federal authorities and was sentenced to six years in prison.

But there was more than just smoke to some of the other claims. Hunter Biden sat on the board of Burisma, which paid him a reported $1 million a year, per his federal tax indictment, while his father had a say in Ukraine policy as the sitting Vice President. Hunter himself has since called joining Burisma “absolutely a mistake.”

He had lied, technically, on a handgun application. He owed a huge unpaid tax bill. And the sweeping pardon his father granted him in the final weeks of his presidency, which Hunter himself described as an act of privilege, did not sit comfortably with many who insist on squeaky-clean government.

Given the allegations backed up by at least some evidence, Democrats understandably have struggled to walk a clear moral line with Hunter Biden. In such cases, it’s instructive to turn to a thought experiment that our legal process regularly deploys, which in the federal rules of civil procedure is called a 12(b)(6). When a defendant moves to dismiss a court case, the judge must assume for purposes of that motion that every allegation in the complaint is true. This is not because the court has decided they are, but because the core question before it is whether, granting all of the allegations the benefit of the doubt, there is still a case.

When we apply the 12(b)(6) standard to Hunter Biden, the picture comes into focus. Assume the Burisma arrangement was exactly what it looked like: a young man with a serious addiction and no particular expertise in Ukrainian energy policy, collecting a reported $1 million a year because of whose son he was. Assume the laptop contents are genuine and he was an addict and a playboy as the salacious photos indicate. Assume the pardon, however legally unimpeachable, was still a father deploying presidential power to protect his son.

Grant all of it as true for purposes of argument.

Does that decide the case? Hunter Biden holds no office and is seeking none. He controls no public resources and asks for no public trust. He is a private citizen attempting to rebuild his life, and he has acknowledged his worst chapters with a candor that feels, even to some of his harshest critics, pained and genuine. The conduct assumed to be true is indefensible. But it’s conduct he has faced rather than denied.

That reckoning came into sharp relief in late May when he sat down for a nearly two-hour conversation with Candace Owens, a far-right podcaster who had spent years mocking him and whose program he had every reason to avoid. Biden discussed his addiction, his legal battles and his years as a political target. “They tore off all my clothes, tarred and feathered me, and put me in the center of town, and said look at him,” he told her. “I survived.”

Owens, apparently caught off guard by his candor, responded with remorse. “I’m sorry I contributed to that,” she said. “I genuinely am so sorry.”

The reaction that followed crossed some surprising lines. Trump voters posted that they found him relatable, even likable. On social media, where Hunter had taken to posting with a sharp, self-deprecating wit he labeled “radical honesty,” millions of views accumulated. When asked about the bag of cocaine found at the White House during his father’s presidency, he wrote: “It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs.”

When we assume the claims against Hunter Biden, backed by at least some credible and specific evidence, are true, we still wind up ready to repair the rupture he created. But his is the easier case. Extending grace to someone in Hunter Biden’s current position costs relatively little, and there are no stakes for the rest of us anymore. The cross-partisan warmth he’s generated reflects some genuine admiration for his honesty, or at least relief at seeing someone from that world capable of admitting a mistake.

The Platner problem

Graham Platner is asking for something considerably more than sympathy. A United States Senate seat carries real power, including over judicial confirmations, health care legislation and the lives of people who may never even know his name. The ledger he invited us to inspect carries higher consequences for the country than Hunter Biden’s. And when we assume, for purposes of argument, that all the allegations backed by at least some credible evidence are true, the case is more complicated.

Assume the Reddit posts reflect how he actually thought about sexual assault survivors and gay people for years. Assume the sexually explicit messages to women outside his marriage happened as reported. Assume the behavior his former partners described—volatile, insulting, physically intimidating—is accurately characterized. Assume the specific allegation of physical restraint, of a woman locked in a room, occurred as described. Grant all of it.

Does that decide the case? The honest answer is that it doesn’t, at least not automatically. Platner’s behavior, assuming the allegations are true, was toxic and abusive. His supporters stress that it occurred during the darkest period of his life, characterized by undiagnosed PTSD from four combat deployments and compounded by heavy drinking. That context might explain his conduct, but it does not excuse it, and it does not erase the harm. But it is structurally different from the exercise of public power.

The question before Maine voters was whether the man who said and did those things is the man standing before them now, and whether, given what they know, they believed a Senate seat would give such a man too much power and authority. These are questions on which reasonable people can disagree (I, myself, wanted him to step aside). But this question was litigated out in the open for weeks ahead of Tuesday’s election, and most of Maine’s Democratic primary voters decided he is not, and that they do not. Whether that judgment is correct may take years to know.

What makes the Platner case genuinely difficult, and what most of his prominent supporters decline to acknowledge, is that Platner is not someone many would trust around their own daughters or friends. His conduct was directed at other people. That includes specific women who came forward, at personal cost, to describe what they experienced. That is a different moral weight than the self-destruction of Hunter Biden, whose worst behavior was largely his own to absorb.

The most serious physical allegations come from Lyndsey Fifield, Platner’s former girlfriend, who happens also to be a conservative operative and visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a right-wing political organization promoting a “conservative alternative to feminist tenets.” Fifield went public at the request of New York Times reporters and is the only former romantic partner of Platner alleging anything physical, including the locked room and the physical restraint. Her own political history provides relevant and rather ironic context: She co-founded a group called Ladies for Kavanaugh in 2018, publicly dismissing Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh as “baseless, 11th-hour accusations orchestrated to stop his confirmation.”

That history does not make her account false. But it does complicate the question, and it did hand Democrats and Platner supporters a convenient exit from a principle they spent years insisting was non-negotiable. “Believe women” was the powerful rallying cry of the #MeToo era. It was a standard that Democratic leaders invoked with force and consistency whenever Republican nominees faced accusations from their past. Fifield’s history of dismissing other women’s allegations made it possible for some to set that standard aside in this case, or at least put an asterisk beside it.

Democratic leaders have sought to provide a framework for moving on from the allegations but have done so with varying degrees of success. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), appearing on CNN after the primary, said voters had given Platner “a chance at redemption” and called his speech a display of “both humility and strength.” To his credit, Khanna had previously and correctly described the conduct in the Times report as “misogynistic” and “wrong” before pivoting to Platner’s policy positions, which stand in stark contrast to the sycophancy and useless “concern” of incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). It was a utilitarian argument paired with a moral reckoning.

Other congressional leaders fell short. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sought to collapse the entire set of allegations into a private question about Platner’s marriage and redirected the issue to housing costs and grocery prices. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who in 2018 cited “credible allegations” in opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation, dismissed reports of Platner’s texting, emphasizing that Platner is “making clear what he fights for.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and one of the most prominent #MeToo voices of the past decade, responded through a spokesperson with just seven words: “We are still going to win Maine.”

The most honest voice arguably belonged to Daira Smith-Rodriguez, a military sexual assault survivor who had been running for the same Senate seat. She dropped out in October after Platner’s Reddit posts surfaced but declined to endorse Platner, supporting Gov. Janet Mills instead. “As a survivor of military sexual assault, I cannot, in good conscience, indicate support or remain silent if there is even a possibility that someone who questions the reality of this crisis could be elevated to the United States Senate,” she stated.

None of this means Platner should have been compelled to withdraw from the race. His campaign certainly didn’t believe so. It at least means, however, that the lawmakers backing him should be clearer and sturdier in their assessments and leadership. They should acknowledge the tension and doubts many voters understandably have, honor the women who came forward, and accept the discomfort of the choice without dressing it up as something cleaner than it is.

There is some merit to the utilitarian argument around Platner. Control of the Senate may well run through the election in Maine. Indeed, it is hard to see how Democrats retake the Senate without the Pine Tree State in the blue column. The Senate majority will determine who chairs committees, which judicial nominees get confirmed, perhaps even whether the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare survive the next assault or whether voting rights legislation ever reaches a floor vote.

The people most harmed by continued Republican Senate control are not powerful. They are the uninsured, the elderly, the poor, the people whose rights are actively being dismantled and whose representation is being actively suppressed. Weighing their interests against the moral discomfort of supporting a flawed candidate is not cynicism. It is the reality of governing.

But that argument has to be made honestly, not smuggled in. Platner himself, to his credit, came closer to landing that plane than most of his Senate supporters did. He opened the ledger and invited the public’s inspection. The least the Democratic Party could do is conduct it.

Beyond repair

When we 12(b)(6) men like Pete Hegseth and Ken Paxton, and assume all the specifically alleged claims against them are true, the picture again sharpens considerably—but in the other direction.

When we assume the truth of the allegations against Hegseth, a dark picture emerges. Hegseth was a senior Fox News host who drank heavily and was publicly intoxicated on multiple occasions. He was accused of sexual assault by a woman who reported the incident to police the same night it allegedly occurred. He holds views on race and religion that multiple colleagues described as extreme and sports his own tattoo that is widely associated with Christian nationalism.

Despite all this, he was nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense. That would make him the civilian leader of a military institution with a documented, catastrophic sexual assault crisis affecting tens of thousands of service members every year. Since taking office, he has imposed his prejudicial and hateful views about women and racial minorities on the military, firing career leaders and blocking promotions of those he accused of being “DEI” supporters or hires.

In short, the specific nature of the claims assumed to be true mapped directly onto the specific power being conferred. But unlike Biden or Platner, Hegseth did not acknowledge any of it. He raged at the accusations and called them a political hit. The Senate confirmed him anyway, on a near party-line vote, because he was the man their leader wanted.

We find the same when applying the legal dismissal standard to Ken Paxton, Texas’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate: securities fraud, abuse of office to benefit a political donor, retaliation against whistleblowers from his own office, and an active role in attempting to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. The Texas House, controlled by his own party, found the evidence sufficient to impeach him.

Like Hegseth, Paxton has never acknowledged a single charge. He has never described a dark period he has grown from, a version of himself he has left behind, or a ledger he is willing to open. He is not asking voters to weigh the distance he has traveled. Instead, he is asking them to ratify the conduct itself. And last month, with Donald Trump’s endorsement secured and loyalty to the president established as the only currency that matters, he won the Texas Republican Senate primary runoff with about 64 percent of the vote.

The contrast with Biden and Platner is not that their alleged conduct was less serious than Hegseth’s and Paxton’s, though it objectively is. The contrast is structural. Hegseth’s alleged conduct was directly relevant to the specific institution he was being asked to lead. Paxton’s alleged crimes are the exercise of the very power he is seeking more of. Rather than acknowledge the rupture of trust and seek repair and forgiveness from supporters, they have demanded to be believed over their accusers. Their party, calculating that the political stakes justified the cost, has obliged.

On Wednesday, Trump called Graham Platner “a thug” and “a cheap, no-good person,” wondering aloud what would happen if Republicans had nominated someone with that kind of past. This from a man who has been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil court, paid hush money to a porn actress to conceal an affair, and admitted on tape to grabbing women by their genitals. He has never acknowledged wrongdoing of any kind in any forum.

Repair matters most, but it doesn’t come easy

There is a principle recognized across the full range of human relationships, from the earliest bond between parent and child to marriages, friendships, and professional relationships. Rupture is inevitable: trust broken, harm inflicted, a relationship damaged by conduct that cannot seemingly be undone.

What matters most though is not the rupture itself but the repair that follows. Character is revealed in the willingness to face the damage, attempt repair and accept that forgiveness is not guaranteed. A child who breaks something and hides it learns only fear and concealment. A child who breaks something, admits it, and works to make it right learns something far more valuable.

Hunter Biden ruptured trust — with his family, with Democrats who wanted a clean standard-bearer family, and with Americans who believe that proximity to power should not be a personal ATM. Graham Platner ruptured trust with voters who wanted their Senate candidate to be a decent and respectful person, and with a party that has staked considerable moral authority on taking seriously the harm men do to women. Both men are asking us now to be part of the repair. That ask is not nothing. In a political culture that rewards denial and punishes vulnerability, it is actually rare. Whether it is genuine remains to be seen.

Pete Hegseth and Ken Paxton have offered no such invitation, choosing instead to deny, conceal and deflect. There has been no acknowledgment by either man of rupture, no gesture toward repair, no moment in which they have stood before those they harmed or the institutions they damaged and said, “I did that, and I am working to be something different.” Hegseth performed victimhood and was confirmed to lead the largest government institution in the U.S., whose very members he is now harming in entirely foreseeable ways. Paxton turned the powers of his office toward personal enrichment and political corruption, was impeached by his own party, and still won the support of MAGA voters who are willing to overlook his wrongdoing and crimes—or even see them as evidence of his anti-establishment credentials.

Democrats yearn to elevate candidates who are “of the people” but have yet to grapple fully with what that often means. People who have spent their lives out of the public eye rarely arrive as political candidates with pristine social media histories and zero personal baggage. That has left voters making tough calls about which flawed figures deserve our trust and which do not.

Those calculations are often unavoidable in a democratic society. But they are worth making honestly, which means acknowledging what was broken and the people who were harmed, while asking whether what is offered in return is genuine repair. The answer to that question could not only provide much-needed moral clarity but actually decide important elections—and even Senate control.

Importantly, repair cannot simply be declared by the person who caused the rupture. And it cannot become a way to sweep aside serious problems, particularly around misogyny and toxic behavior. It has to be tested over time, especially by how seriously a candidate like Platner treats the objections of the people harmed and the concerns of voters still unwilling to trust him.