If you follow presidential politics online, chances are you’re familiar with journalist and Forest Lake native Aaron Rupar’s work.

For seven years now, he has posted video clips of Donald Trump speeches, rallies and interviews to Twitter, where they go viral, spark discussions and get quoted on television and in news stories. While covering the former president does take up much of his time, Rupar also covers the president’s fellow travelers, the Republicans who defied or capitulated to him and the Democrats seeking to unseat him from power. Rupar does plenty of writing, but he built his empire on clipping videos.

That empire includes more than 989,000 followers on Twitter (yes, I know it’s now called X), a successful Substack newsletter with more than 145,000 subscribers and four writers and a 2022 invitation to visit the Biden White House.

Rupar graduated from Hamline University with a degree in political science and philosophy and went on to earn a master’s in philosophy at the University of Minnesota in 2010. After brief stints at Faribault Daily News and Southwest Journal, Rupar landed a job blogging for the late City Pages, where he established himself as writer skilled at crafting viral posts. He spent nearly three years at the alt-weekly and, in 2016, made the leap to D.C. and took a gig as associate editor for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

In the fall of 2017, Rupar was going through training on the video editing service SnapStream when, one night, he happened to catch John Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, defending Confederate general Robert E. Lee on Fox News. Shocked at what he was hearing, Rupar clipped the video, tweeted it and watched it blow up. That simple move forever changed the trajectory of his career.

By the time Rupar moved on to become associate editor of politics and policy for Vox the following year, he had become famous. Twitter famous, at least. In late 2021, Rupar made yet another leap when he departed Vox and launched his own Substack newsletter, Public Notice.

He moved back to Minnesota in the summer of 2020 with his wife and newborn daughter to ride out the pandemic with his family. He has since worked to further grow Public Notice while navigating the joys and perils of parenting two young children.

Make no mistake, Rupar keeps his political beliefs front and center. As it reads in his newsletter’s about section: “Over three years at Vox, Aaron established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of Trumpism, explaining what’s happening on the American right for a largely progressive audience. … Public Notice is fair, but not impartial. We think democracy and free and fair elections are good things and, unlike a lot of mainstream coverage, are not shy about saying so — or about holding major outlets accountable when they equivocate.”

I talked to Rupar on the afternoon of Halloween. That day, he had already done a live video on Substack’s app, a video hit for the Times of London and an interview on Sirius Radio. That, and he thought he might have caught pneumonia from his kids’ daycare.

Here’s what he had to say about his life, his work and Trump.

QTell me about your decision to go independent and start Public Notice.

AWhen I was at Vox, I was doing blog-style reporting where I was doing a post every day or sometimes two a day. I realized that Substack was going to be a pretty good fit for me.

And at that point, Substack was offering advances for people like me to entice them to take the plunge. It was sort of like an insurance policy where if, for whatever reason, your Substack really tanked, at least you had income for a year. They no longer do that because they had some bad experiences with people. But for me, it’s worked out well.

QHow long did it take for Public Notice to turn a profit? Was there a turning point where you realized it was going to work?

AIt grew pretty steadily that first year and I ended up making almost exactly the amount of my advance. But then, kind of ironically, when Elon Musk suspended me from Twitter at the end of 2022, that led to a huge influx of subscribers because I kind of became this martyr for the cause there for a couple days. That was the big turning point. I went from 40,000 subscribers to 80,000. And I’ve been on a pretty good growth path since. (Musk banned Rupar and a handful of other journalists, but reinstated them days later.)

The other thing that was a turning point was in May 2022 when my second kid was born. I’d been at it for a year and a half at that point. When you’re independent, you don’t really have leave or anything like that. So I was brainstorming about how I was going to do this. I didn’t want to work when I had a newborn at home. I wanted to at least dial it back a little bit.

So I put out a call on Twitter, like, “Hey, if you’re a freelance journalist and you’re looking to pick up some extra writing, let me know.” And I stumbled into some really great relationships.

It shifted to me almost being more of a publisher. I was doing one newsletter a week at that point and I had contributors doing two. Now it’s like maybe I write one newsletter every couple weeks and it’s basically contributors for all the rest of them. That led to a bit better work/life balance for me. By the time I was ramping work back up, it was clear to me that having contributors who had some areas of expertise that were different than mine helped me broaden out the coverage.

QMost people don’t actively use Twitter, and Twitter isn’t real life. But, at least in terms of politics, it kind of is real life. Both Ron DeSantis and JD Vance ran very Twitter-centric campaigns. Some people have left Twitter, but a lot of media folks and politicians are still there.

AYeah, definitely. I have tried to broaden out and I’m on Bluesky, Threads and Substack Notes now. But for people like me who are covering politics, you still have the broadest cross section on Twitter. It’s still the timeline that I spend the most time looking at, for my own purposes of gathering information and interacting with people.

It has carried on in this zombified format where it’s not really a welcoming place at this point, unless you’re a right wing conservative. But none of the other platforms have emerged as a viable alternative. Even if they did, part of the beauty of it is having the spectrum of views.

QYou did bring up work/life balance. How do you make that work?

AIt’s been pretty rough lately. Obviously, I cover Trump and he’s been doing two or three rallies a day. I feel obligated to watch as many of them as I can, including in the evenings. For the past month, I’ve really been grinding as hard as I can. I try to watch everything, all the Kamala Harris rallies and, of course, Tim Walz and JD Vance and other notables like when Elon was campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania.

You can’t really step away when people come to rely on you to watch this stuff for them. It’s nice to be in that role where people value your work in that way, but it does take a toll. And in that sense, I am eager to get through Tuesday and hopefully be able to take a breath and relax, a little bit, during the holiday season.

QOn July 21, you tweeted how you were taking the rest of the day off from Twitter. And then Biden announced he was stepping down.

AYeah, it was a Sunday. And I think I had stepped away from doing the morning news show tweeting that I usually do because I was going to a Twins game. As soon as I got to the game, the news broke.

Actually, the one that is even more infamous was the one where Trump got shot, at the rally in Butler. I went to see Earth, Wind and Fire with my mom that night, so I posted something like, “Hey everyone, I’m missing this Trump rally. Have a good evening.” And then five minutes on the highway to the show, my phone started blowing up.

QYou’re at the forefront of left-leaning journalists who call out the mainstream media for softballing Trump coverage. You’ve helped popularize the term “sanewashing.”

AI started using it this summer. I didn’t invent it, but I’m happy to be credited with popularizing it. I think it captures a problem that a lot of people have with mainstream media coverage of Trump. And I think it’s something I’m uniquely positioned to talk about just because I watch Trump so closely.

You’ll be watching something like that speech he gave last weekend where he was talking about Arnold Palmer showering and the golfers complimenting his manhood. Then you read the New York Times and they describe it as a “golf story.” That’s the quintessential example where I think there’s almost a sense of embarrassment with the Times, where they don’t really want to engage with what Trump is actually saying. They kind of sanitize it for their readers. And you end up with a misleading perception of what happened at the event.

That is part of the reason the rally he had at Madison Square Garden has been such a disaster for him in terms of the political fallout. He made it such a spectacle, you had networks that don’t usually broadcast his speeches broadcasting that speech. You had people making the types of racist comments that are pretty commonplace for the warm-up speakers. But it was just higher profile and when people see it up close and watch it for themselves, it’s really weird and dark stuff.

QDo you have any concept of how many Trump rallies you’ve watched? It seems to me that you are more intimately aware of what he’s said publicly than the vast majority of people.

AYeah, even the vast majority of journalists. Obviously, I don’t travel to his rallies, but I’ve probably watched 300 or 400 of them. And there’s the stumping for various candidates, the round table events and other campaign stops he does.

In some ways they haven’t really changed at all. In other ways, they’ve really changed. I mean, I posted a video the other day comparing the first political rally he did, which was his 2015 announcement when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower, with a speech he gave a couple days ago. The difference is jarring. He’s really slowed down and he looks a lot more haggard, but the content was remarkably similar.

QOne of the criticisms you’ve received from other journalists is that there’s this sense among Trump supporters that everyone on the left is out to get him and you’re just fueling the fire.

AThere’s a difficult conversation around when is it irresponsible to amplify Trump versus when is it basic journalism. I always try to provide context in terms of fact checks or pointing out when Trump is lying and explaining the motive behind his lies when there clearly is one.

I try not to amplify every little smear here and there. There is a sense in which he can use reporters to get his talking points out there or as a vehicle to attack his foes. On the other hand, I think this idea that the fact people are paying attention to Trump is inherently good for him is kind of belied by what we’ve seen just the last week even.

I view myself as a reporter who covers this stuff and I get the newsworthy tidbits out there. And then beyond that, you let the chips fall, but I certainly have made pains not to do stenography or to use my platform to just get his message out there. I try to always contextualize it.

I do grant that it’s a complicated discussion and that I’m not sure I have all the right answers on that.

QSome critics say the media wants Trump to win because he gets clicks. To be clear, you want to see Trump defeated, right?

AOh yeah, definitely. I mean, for the sake of my kids just living in a country where we have rule of law and civil rights, bodily autonomy, a lot of things we take for granted.

QSo if he does lose, what does that mean for you and Public Notice?

AWell, I cover American politics broadly. I don’t think American politics will be dull suddenly if Trump is defeated. I think what the future of the Republican party is going to look like will be really fascinating to watch. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. It’s impossible to predict what the future looks like. But I would certainly like it if Trump loses and we have a little bit more calm. If I can take a little bit of time off, that’d be great.