Here’s a lovely piece about Aaron Rupar, the man who provides the clips that I rely upon to document the atrocities I share with you every day. He has a great eye for what’s important and has made it possible to follow the story of this administration on video.
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.
I hear that…
And good on Aaron for this:
“It’s really difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is,” says Rupar. “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.”
Yep, yep, yep. You can’t know just how unhinged and outrageous this whole thing is without paying very close attention to Trump and it’s very hard to keep your humanity sometimes. But Aaron remains as sincere, genuine and authentic as he’s always been, a true mensch. I don’t know that I could have continued to do this if he wasn’t performing this valuable service.