Steve Sack
A political cartoon is a visual metaphor – a picture that instantly distills a complex front-page story into its essence. From the era of Thomas Nast onward, political cartoons have been central to the First Amendment mission of the Fourth Estate, using satire and exaggeration to expose deeper truths. Steve Sack’s cartoons of Donald Trump have done exactly that, depicting narcissism, deceits, oscillations, cruelty, and spectacle to illuminate the subject’s character.
Sack became one of the most consequential editorial cartoonists of the past half century during his lengthy career at The Minnesota Star Tribune. In 2013 he received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, in recognition of a body of work remarkable in its originality. Through more than four decades he created roughly 10,000 cartoons, brilliantly skewering the political, cultural, and meteorological quirks of Minnesota life. Soft-spoken and armed with an exceptionally dry wit, Sack carries his immense talent with striking modesty.
Though his work generally reflects a center-left tilt, Sack’s audience extends far beyond ideological lines. Hypocrisy, pomposity, and absurdity are his targets, and he wields his mordant humor with equal opportunity across the political spectrum.
In 2022 Sack underwent cancer treatment that left him with severe nerve damage in his right hand - a devastating blow for an artist whose creative life depended on dexterity. The condition forced his early retirement and left him unable to draw a farewell cartoon.
Yet Sack’s creative impulse proved irrepressible. He painstakingly retrained himself to draw with his left hand and three years later he returned to cartooning. While Trump’s second term provided fresh material for Sack’s visual harpoons, Sack has been particularly offended by the harshness and cruelty he perceived in the administration’s immigration policies.
His artistic gifts extend far beyond cartooning. Sack is also an accomplished oil painter, sculptor, stained-glass artist, potter, and quilt maker. More recently, he has embraced 3D printing, using it to create sculptural renditions of many of his favorite subjects.
In 2017, the Star Tribune published a collection of his surpassing cartoons in a book, "The First and Only Book of Sack.” Sack has subsequently launched a Substack called The Art of Sack.
“I'm concerned about the war on Minnesota and our country. Really, it's very dangerous. I think we have a chance of escaping the worst of it, but I don't trust the people in power right now, Trump has already shown how far he would go the first time, and now he's got more henchmen, more expertise, more muscle behind him. I put nothing past the guy.”
BLOOMINGTON, MINNESOTA - FEBRUARY 10, 2026