The viral ‘bloodbath’ clip and the rise of the liberal video influencer

The Scene

The day before the State of the Union, the Biden administration hosted a group of social media influencers to talk strategy. They got a preview of the speech, embargoed until it was delivered; they talked with White House strategist Anita Dunn and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff about the president’s agenda. Two guests in particular, Aaron Rupar and Ron Filipkowski, had the power to drive day-long news cycles with carefully chosen video clips.

“I don’t consider myself all that important, so it was very surprising to me that they all followed me on Twitter,” Filipkowski told Semafor. “It was kind of shocking to me that they paid so much attention to what I did.”

Millions of people pay attention to the Florida-based Filipkowski, the Minnesota-based Rupar, and the anonymous Acyn, a video editor in Los Angeles who works under Filipkowski at the activist liberal news site MeidasTouch. They have a combined 2.3 million followers on X, formerly Twitter, though only Filipkowski pays for a blue check. And their editorial judgments have immense influence on campaign coverage and the political discourse.

That was proven over the weekend when Acyn clipped 17 seconds from Donald Trump’s Saturday rally speech in Ohio — a riff on his plan for a 100% tariff on foreign cars, warning that “if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath.” The text of Acyn’s post quoted Trump, but did not include his comments about the auto industry, enraging Republicans who complained it was misleading. Democrats, meanwhile, leaped to demand news outlets cover it as a major story that underscored Trump’s violent intentions.

The Biden campaign shared a shorter clip of the same moment 58 minutes later, and on Sunday and Monday, Republicans who ventured onto news shows were confronted with a “bloodbath” question, rejecting the premise, but failing to stop its spread.

“Look, I talk in a different format than what the former president does,” South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds told CNN on Sunday, repeatedly resisting an ask to condemn the “bloodbath” language. Some Trump critics on the left and right blanched at the interpretation, but they were outnumbered by Democrats like Hillary Clinton (“What would you say if you saw this in another country?”) — and by the Biden campaign, which cut the clip into a web ad.

“The problem that he ran into with the ‘bloodbath’ thing was that he gave all of these networks a very easy headline and frame,” Rupar told Semafor. Rupar talked frequently with Acyn, over direct messages; after the Ohio speech, he recalled Acyn saying it was “kind of boring,” as he suggested there was a lot of potential content. In the end, Acyn’s “bloodbath” clip drove days of news.

“We compete in that we’re posting a lot of similar stuff for a similar audience,” said Rupar. “But it’s not like it’s some zero-sum game. There’s room for everybody.”

The White House agreed.

“We need to be creative and move fast to contrast the President’s optimistic agenda for the future with the extreme agenda of Republican officials who want to take us back in time,” Dunn said in a statement to Semafor. “Aaron, Ron, and many others are on the front lines of making sure the American people know the truth of what is at stake.”

David’s view

For all its Elon-era quirks and maladies, like the inability to post anything without a spambot sliding into replies, X hasn’t lost its power to drive the news cycle. It’s the most popular conveyance for short video clips, which can be copied and re-shared by anyone, with little care for context — urban crime, bad AI, and the worst moments from political speeches.

Last summer, Democrats believed they were losing this info war to the right, and specifically to the Republican National Committee, whose rapid response account was a nonstop clip machine. If Joe Biden ambled around before leaving a stage, it would show up on RNC Research, and there was nothing Democrats could do; Biden’s speeches were seen less, and shared less, than his verbal and physical miscues.

So the Biden campaign beefed up its rapid response team, now at a dozen people, sharing potentially viral videos on its BidenHarrisHQ account, which has clocked one billion impressions since its August 2023 relaunch — 26 million alone of a moment when Nikki Haley gave a rambling response to a New Hampshire town hall attendee who asked about the cause of the Civil War.

It worked because of the independent video-clippers — mainly Rupar and the MeidasTouch team — that looked relentlessly for killer moments from Trump interviews and rallies. Trump gave most of his interviews to ideologically friendly outlets, and those outlets had content that liberal viewers would never see unless it was presented elsewhere.

“Every morning, I get up and I rip through the Maria Bartiromo show to see which guests are on there,” said Rupar, who now employs “some really brilliant and talented people” to help with his Public Notice newsletter. “I rip through Fox and Friends. I rip through the Newsmax morning show.”

Rupar and Filipkowski frequently saw their videos get spread around X, then appear in news segments, then, sometimes, in late-night monologues. One of Filipkowski’s goals was changing the storyline of presidential feebleness, the driver of so many Republican video clips, by making every Trump slip infamous. The Biden campaign launched a similar effort.

“The Meidas guys, as a team, said: We are going to do this to Trump,” Filipkowski said. “We are going to hit every gaffe, every mispronunciation, every slurred word, every mispronounced name, every time he mixes up a name. We’re going to clip that and we’re going to put it out and we’re going to put it in montages. No one else was doing that. Before last August, you can’t find a mainstream media story about Trump mispronouncing and slurring words. They weren’t out there.”

The Biden campaign didn’t comment directly on how a few influential anti-Trump accounts, working on laptops with video-clipping software, had become so important in shaping campaign coverage. But Matt Gorman, a longtime GOP communications pro who worked on Sen. Tim Scott’s presidential campaign, said “online personalities” had natural advantages over campaign accounts or traditional media.

A media outlet might hesitate to post something that critics could call out for missing context; a campaign was assumed to be bending facts for its own benefit. (Think of the campaign reactions to their candidates’ debate performances, which never seriously compete with viral clips.) It was smarter, said Gorman, for campaigns to cultivate allies, then promote their work.

“That’s the way rapid response is going,” said Gorman. “If Biden were to embed the video in a press release, no one would see it or click.”

And plenty of people click on these accounts. Later on Monday, Trump filed a lawsuit against ABC News and George Stephanopoulous for defamation, citing Rupar five times to show how the host’s description of the E. Jean Caroll case had spread through the media and damaged the former president.

Room for Disagreement

The larger meaning of Trump’s “bloodbath” comment, that the auto industry would be gutted if he didn’t win the election, worried some liberals who felt Democrats should pick fights on stronger ground. Kevin Drum, arguing with Trump critic George Conway, said that hyping Trump clips would “give him yet another excuse to call out how unfairly he’s treated.” The Intercept’s Ryan Grim called Rupar, and people like him, “Trump’s most valuable weapons,” for highlighting quotes that Trump could spin away.

“My sense is that he is more about kneecapping people like me than he is actually opposing Trump,” said Rupar. (Grim called Rupar “a threat to the free press, undermining honest reporters by presenting himself as a journalist but behaving as a partisan hack.”)

The View From The Trump Campaign

Biden’s rival tried to turn the “bloodbath” coverage to his advantage, releasing a video on Monday that blamed the president for a “border bloodbath,” compiling news clips of illegal immigrants accused of grisly crimes — which trended on X afterward, and led a fundraising email.

“No amount of gaslighting from the Biden campaign can mask Biden’s Bloodbath he has brought all across America,” said Trump spokesman Steven Cheung, “from the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal costing American lives, record number of illegals crossing the border to kill Americans, making America less safe with a feckless foreign policy, and allowing rampant crime to explode in cities.”

Notable

• In Politico, Meredith McGraw profiled Filipkowski at his Sarasota home, explaining how he could “blow up a politician’s comment or gaffe with attention.”

• In the New York Times, Maggie Astor studies how the “bloodbath” quote was used by both campaigns, irking Republicans like Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy: “That kind of rhetoric, it’s always on the edge — maybe doesn’t cross, maybe does, depending upon your perspective.”