Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Muck Rake Political Podcast. I am your host, Nick Houselman.

And at the current moment, Jared D.E. Sexton, is not with us today. But I am really pleased to bring

on to the show, Aaron Rupar, who is an independent journalist and the publisher of the Public

Notice newsletter, which you can find it, publicnotice.com.

It's about CO. And Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, it's great to connect. You know, I knew you from your basketball account. I wasn't even

aware that you do a political podcast, but looking forward to to talk in some politics and maybe

a little bit of hoops here and there too.

We'll see. Oh, absolutely. We can definitely get into that. And there's actually, there's some

interesting parallels as well to that. So, you know, if for those of you who are out there who

are listening, who are not familiar with Aaron's work, it is a yeoman's job to go through

hours and hours of video, of interviews, of all sorts of things that Trump administration is doing and posting them and sharing them.

So, you know, we just went through a NATO meeting in the White House with Trump.

Give us a little insight to what that's like to have to cover these things live and then,

you know, as quickly as you possibly can get these clips out while they're happening,

while adding perhaps a little bit of, you know, context to what's going on.

What does that like for you?

Yeah.

You know, it feels like the Biden years were kind of a reprieve from this because, you know,

of course, I covered Trump during his first term as well back when I was at First Think Progress and then Vox during those years. And so that, you know, I've been doing this for a while, but there's kind of the sense that you're on call every day. And, you know, you and I were talking over the weekend about scheduling this conversation. And, you know, I regret that I have to be kind of like, well, you know, it depends what Trump's schedule is going to be like. And then you were kind of like, well, he has an event. What time is it scheduled to start? And I had to explain like, well, it doesn't really matter when it's scheduled to start because in the case of this event with the NATO secretary today, it started about an hour late. and you just don't know, but like you kind of alluded to, that's a big part of my job is watching these events live and clipping them. And of course, there is kind of, you know, it's like any type of news reporting, you know, in the basketball context, I guess we can reflect on like the Shams, Woj rivalry from back in the day. Of course, Wojjodge has moved on, but where, you know, you do want to

be first with the clips or at least be timely with them because there's not much value in posting a clip an hour late that, you know, is already widely out there. So there is kind of that reality that when you're, you know, kind of playing the social media game, you have to sort of be locked in and be flexible. And so, you know, it makes for kind of unpredictable schedule. Of course, I'm covering these events remotely almost all of the time. So, you know, there is that. At least I'm not like on the road, you know, having to put my life like totally on hold. But, you know, with Trump, you know, even last night as he was traveling back to the White House, he had a little stop and chat with reporters at an airport in New Jersey. And so, you know, I happen to just be kind of sitting around my computer when that happened. But, you know, events like that will happen where you feel like you have to kind of hop on and lock in and start clipping what's going on. So, you know, it's not just Trump. I mean, there's, you know, State Department briefings every day. There's, you know, Pam Bondi will be on Fox News. There's just stuff happening all the time. And so there's always stuff that you could be clipping. You know, I could do that 24 hours a day if I wanted to, but I also do the newsletter. And so it does lead to kind of long days, but I am grateful to be able to do this for a living because, you know, as bleak as it is a lot of the time, there is the sense that I'm kind of covering historic events and, you know, that's a lot more interesting than most jobs are. For sure. I mean, it seems a lot easier to digest what's going on with, you know, the little sound bites that you're providing versus having to go through. I mean, I watched a lot of today's, you know, press conference that Trump did. And, you know, it drones on and on for quite a long time. So it's much more, I would imagine, more valuable in today's society to be able to have the sound bites. I'm kind of curious. You know, when I'm doing this on the basketball side, like during basketball games, I will clip a play, and then I will

offer a little analysis of what happened. And I get accused of bias all over the place, all the time,

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