Did The Wall Street Journal report that U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner of Maine called his penis "Mein Furher" in a message to a woman? No, that's not true: That expression doesn't appear anywhere in the article reviewed by Lead Stories, and no credible evidence shows that Platner made such a statement. The purported quote is fabricated, and the phrase as presented in the claim is also misspelled.
The claim appeared in a post and image (archived here) by the @magills_ account on X on May 30, 2026. It read:
lmao
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @magills_ on X.com.)
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article (archived here) reports that, days after announcing his Senate bid in August 2025, Platner's wife alerted his campaign to sexually explicit text messages he had sent to other women. Lead Stories reviewed the article and found neither spelling -- "Mein Furher" nor "Mein Fuhrer" -- anywhere in the text.
Lead Stories also searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo! News (archived here) and did not find any matching reports for "Platner" and "Mein Furher," the incorrect spelling.
Then, Lead Stories searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo! News (archived here) and did not find any matching reports for "Platner" and "Mein Fuhrer," the correct spelling.
Had WSJ reported a version of the story with Platner naming his penis, it almost certainly would have generated widespread news coverage.
The Nazi Germany references relate to a tattoo (archived here) Platner had covered in 2025. He said that, until then, he had not realized the image was associated with Nazi police. At the time, Platner said he got the skull-and-crossbones tattoo in 2007, when he was in his 20s and serving in the Marine Corps.
