JD Vance or Marco Rubio will top the GOP’s 2028 ticket. What it’s missing is Trump‑grade sleaze, and that’s where Maine Democrat Graham Platner comes in.

I come today to solve a problem for the Republican Party, free of charge, because that is the kind of neighbor I am.

The problem is 2028. The movement needs a ticket. JD Vance and Marco Rubio are auditioning hard, and credit where due, both have mastered the one trade the modern Republican Party requires: selling out your own integrity for power and doing it with a straight face.

Vance is the best in the business. He privately compared Donald Trump to Hitler and publicly called Trumpism cultural heroin. He wrote a bestseller explaining that his people were being conned, then joined the con at the executive level. Most men who swallow that much of their own record would show it around the eyes.

Rubio took longer but got there. He spent the 2016 primary calling Trump a con man too vulgar for the presidency. Then Marco did the math, and Marco has always been good at math. Now he runs the State Department for the con man in question. The one impulsive thing he ever did, a joke about the size of Trump’s hands, he apologized for. Took it back like a library book.

So the top of the ticket is covered. And yet, study that stage long enough and you will notice a vacancy. The base will notice it too.

Neither one of them can supply the sleaze. And sleaze is the gravy that holds the whole dish together.

Donald Trump did not merely survive the Access Hollywood tape. He was elevated by it. The two dozen accusers, the porn-star payoff, the 34 felonies for the bookkeeping, the jury that found he sexually abused a writer in a dressing room and the second jury that added $83 million for lying about her. None of that was just tolerated by the faithful. They fed on it. Every scandal was fresh proof their man wasn’t housebroken, that he grabs what he wants and walks away whistling. The swagger is the sales pitch. They call it masculinity. Essential to the cause.

Now audit the heirs. Vance’s misogyny is strictly theoretical. Childless cat ladies was audition tape, a costume that never fit. Rubio is worse than clean, he is wholesome. The movement is about to run one of these family men at the top, and the congregation will taste the offering and know what is missing. Contempt for women is not something you whip up the week before the convention. The crowd can smell a put-on. It has to be sourced. There has to be history.

Which brings me to Graham Platner of Sullivan, Maine.

He is the Democratic nominee for Senate up there, the oyster farmer and Marine who was supposed to retire Susan Collins, and his own party is trying to run him out of the race. Look hard at what Democrats are throwing away. He’s a great candidate but for the wrong party. Platner is what you would get if a nor’easter blew away Trump’s money, his hair, and his orange glow, and left standing everything else MAGA holds dear. If the movement had found him first, he would have primaried Collins.

Start with the archive. The Maine Monitor compiled roughly 2,000 of his deleted Reddit posts. Deleting them was his one mistake. The right move would have been hauling them over to Truth Social, where the worst posts are the platform. In those posts a younger Platner dismisses sexual assault in the military and advises women to take some responsibility by drinking less if they’d rather not be raped. That is raw MAGA talent, in writing, under his own account, years before he had anything to gain. Moronic posting is the hallmark of the MAGA movement and its leader. Platner speaks fluent moron. You cannot fake a decade of timestamps.

Then the marriage file: sexually explicit messages to multiple women while married, per the reporting. Entry-level next to the founder’s felony-grade operation: no fixer, no shell company, no ledger entries dressed up as legal expenses. The boy never got past sole proprietorship. But the aptitude is there. He just needs to learn how to monetize his misdeeds. Trump’s mug shot is on t-shirts already. Add Platner’s face to the back. Instant sellout.

And then there is the chest tattoo that resembled an SS death’s head until he covered it with a Celtic knot. Another cover-up, another rookie move. Hegseth got flagged for extremist tattoos and parlayed them into a book deal and the Pentagon. The knot is a fine piece of ink, but the original will have fans. The kind who march with torches.

And now the newest allegation, which I will handle without cuteness because it deserves none. A woman Platner previously dated has accused him of rape. He denies it. Ex-girlfriends have separately described abusive behavior, which he also disputes. None of it has yet been tested in court, but his current party is treating it with dead seriousness, endorsements pulled within a day, leadership demanding his exit. Platner has the misfortune of belonging to the only party where the alarm still works.

Across the aisle the precedents are settled law. Trump: found liable, then re-elected. Hegseth: paid a settlement to his accuser, confirmed to run the Pentagon by a single vote. Gaetz: tapped for Attorney General while the Ethics Committee finished a report finding evidence he paid for sex with a 17-year-old, and withdrew only because he could not find fifty votes. Platner’s denial lacks the narcissistic fury of Trump, and over there, fury passes for innocence. Think Kavanaugh.

I can hear the objection from the cheap seats. The man’s a leftist. Called himself a communist on that same Reddit. Called police bastards. Spent years posting his contempt for Donald Trump.

So what?

On the police, let’s keep the books straight. Platner called the police bastards once, in a Reddit comment section. On the first day of his second term, Trump pardoned the men who beat the “bastards.” Roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants walked, including men convicted of assaulting the officers defending the Capitol, about 140 of whom were injured. Flagpoles, bear spray, stolen riot shields, all on camera. Platner insulted the police online, for free. The men who put them in the hospital collected pardons for what their leader calls patriotism, and there is talk of paying them for their trouble. On this issue, Platner will have to return to his roots.

And if calling himself a commie once, joking or not, is a problem, I give you the dear leader’s standing admiration for Xi Jinping, a man who runs an actual Communist Party. A little recantation and Platner’s in like Flynn.

As for Platner’s contempt for Trump, that is not a disqualifier in this organization. Platner has already mastered the art of the reversal. When his posts surfaced, he disavowed the communism, disavowed the police talk, and apologized on video without blinking. The man can perform a public recantation on demand. Trump revels in those who recant and fall to their knees at his feet.

So there is my recommendation, wrapped and ribboned. Rubio brings the establishment. Vance brings the tech bros and their money. Whichever one tops the ticket, Platner brings the sleaze portfolio neither of them can carry, and the ticket is whole.

One item remained on the checklist, because due diligence is due diligence. The single thing that party cannot metabolize is genuine shame, and for a while Platner had me worried. The therapy talk, the journey, the not being proud of who he was. It reads like a man who means it. But a man with working shame would have left this race months ago, and Platner is still in it, denying everything. The archive is authentic. The apology is the performance.

Shame is the one preexisting condition his new party wouldn’t cover. I think he’s in the clear.