174 MINUTES WITH... Aaron Parnas

The son of a former Trump crony has become the Gen-Z face of resistance news.

- CAT ZHANG

All the videos Parnas posted on August 16, 2025.

EVERYWHERE IN Washington, D.C., you can find guys like Aaron Parnas—young white politics wonks with diplomas from George Washington University, drawers full of Lululemon athleisure, and C-SPAN addictions. But only one of them has amassed a following as a scrappy independent news anchor—more than 500,000 Substack subscribers, 4.2 million followers on TikTok—large enough to field guest invites from Katie Couric and public fangirling from resistance boomers. Parnas, 26, tells me he gets recognized at least twice a day in the nation’s capitol. “I was at Le Dip,” he says, referring to the Logan Circle politico haunt Le Diplomate, “and three older women start screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘Oh my God, it’s Aaron Parnas!’ They were telling everyone at the restaurant, and I was like, ‘Guys, calm down.”

It’s a Tuesday in July, and we're sitting in Parnas’s bare-bones home office, the only corner of his luxury D.C. condo that he'll allow me to see. (His wife, a lawyer whom he married last year, prefers her privacy.) Arranged on a wooden table are an LED streaming light, a podcast microphone, and many screens—a large Apple computer monitor, two MacBooks, and an iPhone—which display various news and social-media feeds. A package of Sour Punch candy is some of the only color in the room. I watch Parnas juggle devices, rushing through a Christian Broadcasting Network interview clip with House Speaker Mike Johnson on 2x speed, scanning a New Yorker article, and advising Pew Research Center associates over a Zoom call on how to pitch him (“If you want me to read an email, you have to say something like ACTION REQUIRED, even if there’s no action required”), pausing intermittently to record a few videos. “I was hoping today would be a very fast-paced day,” he tells me, disappointed.