Just a note to let you know why my Eric Black Ink column has gone silent. The short and obvious answer is that I’ve retired. 

After a scribbling career that dates from 1973, including five years in Arkansas, then 30 years at the Strib followed by 15 years of the Eric Black Ink column for MinnPost, I seem to have run out of things to say and/or the cognitive capacity to say them clearly enough and often enough to keep Black Ink supplied with copy.

MinnPost has generously given me all the time I needed to finally make the decision to relinquish pen and pixel and, even when I did, they offered to leave open the possibility of contributing occasionally, but I know it won’t be anywhere near as often as in the past. 

My 15 years of MinnPosting have been a wonderful capstone to a very gratifying career in the writing racket, which, of course, you readers and MinnPost supporters all made possible. 

For that, many thanks.

For me, it’s been a blast and a half.

So, as the old saying goes, “See you in the funny papers.”

Yours Truly, getting out while I can still walk, your humble and obedient servant,

Eric Black

Editor’s note: If you’d like to send Eric a note of appreciation, you can do so here. And you can read a note of appreciation from MinnPost co-founder Joel Kramer here.

Reich was much more impressed, and I’m passing along a few of his 20 bullet points with a link at the bottom to his full take. 

Reich argued that “Among other things, the committee has established that:

“Before Election Day, Trump planned to give a false election victory speech. On Election Day, even though the networks were starting to call the race for Biden, Trump declared victory and demanded that voting counts stop. ‘This is a fraud on the American public, an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. We did win this election.’

“…Trump knew he lost. He also knew that there was no evidence of fraud or irregularities sufficient to change the outcome. His Attorney General told him there had been no fraud. His advisors repeatedly told him there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. The Supreme Court rejected his case on December 11. Electors voted on December 14. His senior staff advised him to concede…

“…On December 19…Trump sent a tweet urging his followers to come to Washington on January 6, and it ‘will be wild…’ 

“…Knowing he lost the election, he also pressured the Justice Department to change the results of the election until Justice Department officials threatened mass resignation… 

“…He sought to replace real Biden electors with fake Trump electors on January 6. He knew this was illegal.

“He intentionally summoned his supporters to the Capitol, and then, knowing they were armed, intended that they march to the Capitol… The Secret Service had this information at least 10 days before the attack. On January 6, during his speech on the Ellipse, Trump knew the crowd was armed and dangerous.

“He intentionally endangered the safety of Vice President Pence and his family, and members of Congress, on January 6 by tweeting criticism of Pence, which unleashed the mob to go after Pence, chanting ‘hang Mike Pence.’…He refused to take action, although he could easily have done so. He was repeatedly implored — by his own White House counsel, other White House staff, and members of his family — to condemn the violence, ask rioters to stop and leave the Capitol, and go home. But for 187 minutes he did not…

“…When the riot was underway, his first tweet was: ‘Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country.’ In the view of White House staffers, this ‘poured fuel on the fire.’

“…When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy urged Trump to take action, Trump responded: ‘Well, Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the election than you are.’

“…Even after the 2020 election was certified, he refused to say the election was over. When he finally agreed to address the nation the next evening, he did not want to say words that had been drafted for him — ‘the election is over.’ He was only willing to say ‘Congress has certified the results.’ 

“Trump has never accepted any responsibility for the attack and never acknowledged the deaths of law enforcement officers, because he did not want to be faulted or imply any criticism of the rioters.“The big news is not that a committee of Congress has made a criminal referral to the Justice Department urging that the Department prosecute a former president. The big news is that the committee has compiled overwhelming evidence that the former president has committed serious crimes.”

As I mentioned, this is only a partial list of the elements of the case that Reich listed. This link will get you his full piece.

They left behind a solid, if-no-longer-very-surprising list of Trump’s possible crimes. But — with Republicans scheduled to take over control of the House in January — those charges will not get the kind of follow-up that was formerly anticipated, at least not in Congress.

On a contrary note, among the dozens of judges who ruled against Trump in relation to his 1/6 skullduggery and his efforts to cover it up were 11 who Trump appointed (one-sixth of the total federal judges he appointed).

Trump, it should be noted, has not stopped asserting his Big Lie and the various smaller lies that underlie it, and polls suggesting that a large portion of Republicans believe him, or at least say they do.

Committee member Adam Schiff, D-California, summarized aspects of the committee’s investigative findings. This included the tale of Trump’s now-famous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to “just find 11,780 more” Trump votes, which, Trump noted, was one more than he needed to steal the state that Joe Biden had carried. (Of course, Trump never, until today, has acknowledged that Biden carried Georgia). 

U.S. Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-California, led the committee through the episode in which Trump pressed former Vice President Mike Pence to go along with crackpot schemes to help overturn Biden’s victory during the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes. 

Trump, as you recall, later denounced Pence, inspiring his violent followers to chant “Hang Mike Pence” as they assaulted the Capitol and put Pence in physical danger for his unwillingness to along with Trump’s scheme.

Pence actually showed substantial courage in the episode, as well as commitment to U.S. democracy. But, in a clip played during Monday’s testimony, former Trump assistant Nicholas Luna recalled hearing Trump describing Pence as a “wimp” for refusing to help Trump steal a second term. (Trump also expressed regret for having chosen Pence as a running mate in the first place.)

There was zero support for such views during Monday’s televised sign-off. It would be fun to know whether Mr. T was watching.

Perhaps a fitting ending to this chapter of the tale of Trump’s ego — and, perhaps, his ability at self-delusion, maybe his inability to ever level with his admirers — is to quote the tweet in which he finally called off the mob, which whined: 

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

I wouldn’t want to do it.

But the self-confidence of Donald Trump (at least if we are to take him at his word) is so epic that he never bothered with the usual protestations of caution or, God forbid, humility.

I recall, way back at the beginning of his astonishing march to the presidency in 2016, during the Iowa caucuses (which he lost, by the way, to Ted Cruz), when Trump announced that his supporters were so devoted to him that: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?… It’s, like, incredible.”

And it really was incredible. A century or two of political wisdom would suggest that you don’t brag about how much your supporters love you. You humbly express gratitude for their support and promise that you will try not to let them down. Right? But for Trump in 2016, his arrogance sold.

In 2020, he never stopped bragging, but his luck ran out. The last few thousand of his most fervent admirers paid a terrible price for following his instructions to march from a Fascist-style blood rally to the Capitol and overturn the results of an election that he had lost to more conventionally humble-seeming Joe Biden.

Right now, his 2016 brag about his hold over his fans is being put to a powerful test. Will they all stick with him for one more try in 2024? 

At the moment, the indications aren’t looking too solid for Trump. His unprecedented decision to announce preemptively in 2022 his planned 2024 comeback has met mixed reactions, and his poll numbers are actually falling. Those of his likely chief rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are rising. 

If Trump thought his indecorously early announcement that he would deign to be the Republican nominee again in 2024 would warn off all competitors, it isn’t working. And the latest polls (to which we shouldn’t pay too much attention two years out) show Trump highly vulnerable, at least to DeSantis (who, unlike Trump, hasn’t announced his candidacy yet).

If two polls that came out of the field most recently are any indication, Trump and DeSantis are neck-and-neck, which suggests that DeSantis is the rising star and Trump the falling star, although the two poll results were so unalike as to raise obvious questions.

A Morning Consult poll, graded a “B” by the political numbers-obsessed crew at fivethirtyeight.com showed Trump leading DeSantis 49-31 percent. But a B-plus-rated Suffolk University poll for USA Today had DeSantis leading Trump by 56-33, although the sample size was significantly smaller. Those results are summarized here.

I know it’s too early for all but the truly-obsessed to poll watch. And I don’t even know which of those two frontrunners I would prefer to see get the Republican nomination, because my gut tells me DeSantis would be the stronger general election candidate. 

I’ll try not to write about this again until next year. But, after all, that’s only two weeks away.

If you’re like me, you might have guessed (or assumed) that Republicans in the midterm won their new U.S. House majority primarily through successful gerrymandering from prior cycles. 

Apparently not. They may have won it the old-fashioned way.

New York Times Chief Political Analyst Nate Cohn reported this week that Republican House candidates actually got more collective votes nationwide than Democrats did (and therefore the Republican takeover of the House majority is more small-d democratically legitimate).

Yes, that’s right, although the nationwide margin was small (well, three percentage points if you call that small) if you mush all the 435 House races together, Republicans received 51 percent of the total vote to 48 for the Dems, leaving room for a tiny third-party vote.

As regular readers of Black Ink know, I wasn’t rooting for the Republicans. But I believe in facing facts.

You can read the details via Cohn here, if you have access to the Times.

Cohn notes that something similar happened in 2020, when the national vote for House Republicans exceeded the national vote for their presidential nominee, whatshisname. But if you click through that link above you’ll see that in 44 of the 50 states, Republican House candidates in 2022 got a larger share of the votes than Trump got during his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

(The six exceptions, in which House Democratic nominees in 2022 did a little better – although only in single digits better, percentage-wise – than Biden did in 2020 were Maine, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Kansas, Alaska and Hawaii.)

The explanation, rather obviously, is that Republican House nominees are a lot better-liked by their local Republicans than Trump was, at least after four years of experiencing Trump in the White House.

I’m not sure if this unexpected (at least to me) fact surprises you, but I pass it along for what it’s worth.

Perhaps you will today if you read the piece linked below, written by a Stanford University student, Dasha Navalnaya, who happens to be the daughter of Russian resistance leader Alexei Navalny.

Dasha is completing a degree at Stanford, where she is relatively safe and comfortable compared to her beloved father. He is not only rotting in a Russian prison cell but is also suffering various forms of deprivation and torture designed to break his spirit, or at least serve as a warning to other Russians who might support his movement of resistance to Vladimir Putin’s tyranny.

In this heart-breaking, brave letter of solidarity with her dad, Navalnaya wrote:

“We all know that prison isn’t a place where you want to end up anywhere in the world, but, the conditions of the Russian prison system are far worse than those in the U.S. or Europe. There is nothing like a Russian prison to cripple even those in perfect health. 

“My father survived a chemical weapons poisoning, which took a toll; he spent more than two weeks in a coma and over a month in intensive care. The rehabilitation took months. Shortly after the imprisonment, he started experiencing back pains and a gradual loss of control in his legs. He had to endure a 24-day hunger strike just to get access to medical help.

“Barely surviving the hunger strike did not break his spirit — nothing ever will. But the solitary confinement conditions he is now subject to are clearly aimed at mentally breaking and physically killing him. My dad’s “residence” for over two months now — a 7 by 8 feet punishment cell, which is more of a concrete cage for someone of 6 ‘3 height. He spends days sitting on a low-iron stool (which exacerbates his back pain), with a mug being the only thing he’s allowed to keep. Even his bed is fastened to the wall from 6 AM to 10 PM.

“On Thursday, November 17th, my dad was moved to the strict regime in a solitary housing unit. The rest of the prisoners live in barracks, which they can freely exit, but he will be permanently locked in the solitary cell. He wrote: ‘It is a regular cramped cell, like the punishment cell, except that you can have not one, but two books with you and use the prison kiosk, albeit with a very limited budget.’ These new conditions will also prevent him from receiving any family visits — they are all completely banned. Being able to have a second book is definitely a bonus for an extremely fast reader like my dad.”

It presumably won’t be published in Russia, but you can celebrate your freedom by reading this heart-breaking daughterly tribute and Crie de Coeur in full. It ran in Time magazine, but if you’re not a subscriber you can access it via the excellent Reader Supported News here.

For example, I still look, pretty much every day, at the constantly updated FiveThirtyEight.com graphic that tracks the movement of President Joe Biden’s approval rating. 

The big picture is that after a brief and not-terribly-romantic honeymoon, with Biden’s approval around 55%, Biden never got above that level and fell steadily for two years, bottoming out at around 38 percent approval last July.

But Ol’ Joe has staged a small comeback. Not into positive territory but at least back to the 40s. Today, for the first time in a long time, Biden is a tiny titch less than 10 points underwater with an approval of 42.5 and a disapproval of 52.4. (I said it was a tiny titch. We’ll see if it keeps going up.)

I try to keep in mind that Biden is the guy that beat Trump (although the gracious Mr. T has never acknowledged his defeat and last week completely lost his mind and called for overthrowing the Constitution). 

My gut tells me that Biden knows he shouldn’t seek a second term. I hope he won’t. The most important thing is to keep Trump out of the White House while some remnants of our democracy are still intact.

And the small comeback in Biden’s approval numbers, plus the midterm results, give me a ray of hope that, at least as long as Trump is in the picture, a small, sane majority of the country understands the importance of keeping him — and anyone who resembles him — out of the Oval Office.

Don’t check it every day (although I do), but for the full picture Biden’s approval ups and downs, feel free to click here.

Before Donald Trump, this was seldom an issue. 

Skeptics, I suppose, might point to the aftermath of the Bush vs. Gore election of 2000, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. But that was all about the outcome in Florida, which was decided by less than one-half of one percent of the vote. And, despite plenty of room for grumbling by Team Gore, once the Supremes decided by just 5-4 in favor of Bush, Gore (who had won the national popular vote by more than half a million votes) accepted the result, and so did almost all of his disappointed supporters.

But Trump, who lost both the popular and electoral votes by significant margins in 2020, has never acknowledged that he lost. And, very likely as a result of Trump’s insistence that he was robbed in 2020, millions of his supporters continue to believe (or at least say) that Democrats stole the election and refuse to accept the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s solid 2020 victory in both the popular and electoral vote.

According to a recent Pew survey, there is an interesting dichotomy within that large group of Republican election deniers. A large portion of them said that they did not rely on the news media for their news, but relied directly on Donald Trump.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a lifelong journalist, but that’s kinda creepy to me.

Pew asked a national sample of Republicans whether they accepted the result of the 2020 election and also asked them what source or sources they relied on for their news. It turns out that a large portion said they got their news directly from Trump himself.

Once you accept that rather strange proposition, you will be less surprised that those Republicans were about twice as likely to say that they still believe Trump won the 2020 election. Trump, as you know, continues to tell them that the election was stolen.

In one Pew survey, nearly a third of Republicans said they were getting their news directly from Trump. And so, not surprisingly (although still somewhat amazingly if you can make that work) 61% of those who said they got their information directly from Trump were also significantly more likely to say that “voter fraud is a major problem.” Only 36% of Republicans with a more traditional media diet said the same.

The research by Nicholas Clark and Rolfe Daus Peterson of Susquehanna University on which Pew based its piece also suggested that the more a Republican Trump supporter lives amid a largely Republican and Trump-supporting area, the more likely he or she is to take these extreme views, echoing Trump’s claims that he was robbed in 2020.

But one could also draw the opposite conclusion from this research: that election denialism is almost exclusively a Trump-driven phenomenon, not some deeply rooted cancer in the electorate. Maybe it will just fade away whenever he does.

A fuller New York Times piece discussing this topic is available here.

I’ll just offer two paragraphs, each of which makes a very smart point, and offer a link to the full piece

Paragraph 1:

“American politics has typically had ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ parties. After the Civil War, Republicans controlled American politics for decades. After the New Deal, Democrats dominated. Between 1931 and 1995, Democrats held the House for all but four years. Since 1995, control of the House has flipped four times, and if Republicans win the gavel in 2023, that’ll be five.”

And…

“If you were looking for a three-sentence summary of American politics in recent years, I think you could do worse than this: The parties are so different that even seismic events don’t change many Americans’ minds. The parties are so closely matched that even minuscule shifts in the electoral winds can blow the country onto a wildly different course. And even in a time of profound economic dislocation, American politics has become less about which party is good for your wallet and more about whether the cultural changes of the past 50 years delight or dismay you.”

The full column is here.

The other one, U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, jeopardized her otherwise safe seat by the role she played and was defeated in a primary by a Trumpier Republican. 

Kinzinger, after making clear that he would seek the truth about former President Donald Trump’s role in the attempted overthrow of the transfer of power, knew he could not win another term, and didn’t seek one. 

In a recent interview with Mediaite, he was asked why he was one of the few Republicans “who had the gut” to condemn the recent assault on Paul Pelosi and why he and Cheney showed the level of courage they did in denouncing Donld Trump’s encouraging of a violent overthrow of the U.S. House. 

He replied:

“Liz and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards, and so in complete contrast to cowardism, it looks like courage, when it’s just your bare duty.” 

You can watch that portion of his Mediaite interview, via MSNBC here.