Aaron Rupar sits in front of his computer all day and obsesses about the perfidies of President Donald Trump because he feels it’s his “duty” — not to mention the fact that it’s turned him into a left-bubble internet celebrity, and not a poor one at that.
If that sounds pathetic, it is. But don’t tell that to what’s arguably the U.K.’s most prestigious paper, the Times of London. No, the headline “The man who watches Trump all day, every day” doesn’t sound glamorous, but darned if they don’t try their hardest to make it come across like that.
From Monday’s piece, which makes his job sound like firefighting or being a combat pilot:
The psychological demands of Aaron Rupar’s work are immense. He counts himself lucky to have remained more or less healthy after a decade in his job.
“I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m like a model of mental health,” says the father-of-two from Minnesota. “But for the most part, especially considering what I do and how much time I spend doing it, I think I’ve been able to emerge relatively unscathed.”
Rupar works from his spare room in his Minneapolis house. His job is to watch President Trump. All day, every day.
Spread over two laptop screens, Rupar, 42, follows the frenetic schedule of the president, from the meandering speeches to the impromptu press conferences, the middle-of-the-night social media rants to the sudden interviews on TV.
Let me translate that for you: Since 2017, Rupar has basically been sharing short clips of Trump out of a wider context which make him look bad and using them to gain massive followings on X, Bluesky, and Substack.
No shame in that game, of course, said as a man who sits behind a laptop for a greatly more modest living himself, but please don’t talk to me about the “immense … psychological demands” of a job that can be done in gym shorts and a T-shirt at a desk at home.
But, no, the Times says, “Rupar is a one-man news agency” who does the invaluable service of cataloguing ” Trump’s noteworthy remarks and shar[ing] them instantly on social media.” This, by the way, is what Trump’s own people do themselves, or what you can do if you’re really interested by turning on the TV.
Don’t tell that to Rupar, who will tout his self-induced karoshi to anyone who will listen — in this case, George Grylls, who writes for the Times of London about the grueling service this clip-farm machine is doing.
“I’ve certainly had some days over the years that have been 18-20 hours of pretty much nonstop work,” Rupar says.
“I remember he gave some sort of speech to the Korean legislature that started at my time, like four in the morning, that I woke up for. I’d been working till midnight the night previous. So that’s not super uncommon.”
The results speak for themselves:
Trump’s discolored, swollen hand as photographed Monday
(Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty) pic.twitter.com/MqGk0TpHUV
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2026
Trump: “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. They are lunatics, and you can’t put nuclear weapons in the hands of a lunatic.” pic.twitter.com/WSyyg2h3sh
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026
Trump: “They came in so fast and so hard. ‘Let’s go — bwaaaa!’ They came one right after another. Not as the same time. They don’t want to come at the same time. They had to come right after each other. There was barely any room to land. A tiny little patch of very wet earth.” pic.twitter.com/CLcuuRwsl8
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2026
Discolored hands! A tiny patch of wet earth! An ironic implication that Trump is actually a lunatic with nukes compared with the totally sane mullahs in Iran! What would we do without this guy? I mean, except something worthwhile.
The service he renders, the Times implies, is that while Trump speaks a lot, people don’t pick out the important stuff — at least to Rupar, whose pull-quotes the Times basically gave uncritical deference to.
“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” Rupar said.
“That’s kind of how people are trained to do political journalism. It’s like, ‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy, what’s new?’ So you kind of pick up those things and convey them to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch his rallies, you see that they’re full of hatred, he’s lying constantly, and a lot of it is incoherent.”
“It’s true that he talks to the press a lot,” he added. “But he doesn’t really convey meaningful information.”
So why bother covering it, then? Good question. One is money; Rupar has over a million followers on X, almost a million on Bluesky, and a quarter of a million Substack subscribers who pay him $50 a year.
But he pays a heavy toll for all this, he’d like you to know.
“I think certainly covering this stuff over the last decade has probably negatively affected my mental health just because it’s pretty bleak most of the time,” Rupar said. “But I still get up and feel privileged in some ways to be able to cover historic events for a living. And to have the audience that I have.”
Some heroes hold a post. Others just post as they hold on and wait for their DoorDash order. Both deserve glowing gratitude in the press, apparently — and in most publications, the latter more than the former.
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