As candidate and as president, Donald Trump has spun promises of a revived coal industry and limitless jobs. He has promised the residents of coal country, who have struggled so much in the last couple of decades, a prosperity greater than they ever experienced. In his first presidency, he came nowhere close to fulfilling that pledge.
And now he’s at it again.
While the president does everything in his power to destroy one of the most critical and fastest-growing industries the United States has — green energy — he wants Americans to believe that our future depends on burning more coal.
If anyone listening to Trump believed him, they have awfully short memories.
On Tuesday, the White House gathered a group of coal miners in their work clothes and hard hats to stand behind Trump while he announced a pair of executive orders. The first one orders the attorney general to “take all appropriate action to stop the enforcement of State laws” meant to address “climate change” — a phrase the order used only in scare quotes. The second orders government departments to rescind any regulations limiting coal development and promote the use of the dirtiest form of fossil fuel energy.
“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best,” Trump said. “We’re going to tap that magnificent potential to give our people the glorious future that they deserve, better than they’ve ever had in the past.”
If anyone listening to Trump believed him, they have awfully short memories. That’s because Trump made exactly the same promise in 2016: that he would revive the coal industry and bring back all the jobs that had disappeared. “I love the miners, and we’re going to put the miners back to work,” he said at a rally that year.
Four years later, near the end of his first term, he claimed, “We’re putting our great coal miners back to work.” But it wasn’t true. Even though Trump rolled back environmental regulations, encouraged coal mining on federal lands, and even put a coal industry lobbyist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, he couldn’t stop the steady decline of coal. There were fewer coal jobs when he left office in 2021 than there had been when he was inaugurated the first time. Today, only 40,000 Americans work in the entire coal mining industry.
Trump’s executive order notes that the coal industry “has historically employed hundreds of thousands of Americans.” That is true, but it will never be true again, no matter what the administration does. Though environmental rules were one cause of the long decline of coal jobs, their role was only secondary. The key factors were automation (which steadily reduced the number of miners needed to produce the same amount of coal) and most importantly, competition from other energy sources. The natural gas fracking boom crushed coal, providing an alternative that is just as cheap and plentiful, but creates (somewhat) less pollution. And now renewables are out-competing coal on price as well. As late as 2007, America got half its electricity from coal; that figure is now down to 16%.
It’s a lie many people would like to believe, which is understandable. It isn’t surprising that people in coal country feel betrayed. Their fathers and brothers worked dangerous jobs to provide Americans with power, then watched as those jobs disappeared and their communities suffered. Just as the coal companies bled them dry, today it is Trump and his party that exploit them with false promises. But Trump loves coal. He believes it’s strong, while he sees renewables as weak (it’s an extra bonus that liberals hate fossil fuels). At a black-tie fundraiser Tuesday evening, Trump told the assembled donors that his coal miner supporters don’t need a different economic future. “They love to dig coal,” he said. “That’s what they want to do. They don’t want to do gidgets and widgets and gadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands. They’re big strong hands.” His executive order touts the importance of “coal-based infrastructure to power data centers to meet the electricity needs of AI and high-performance computing operations.” In Trump’s vision of the future, miners pull coal from the ground to power artificial intelligence, eliminating jobs and enriching the tech barons who are helping Trump dismantle the government we all rely on. In all three of his presidential campaigns, Trump got his greatest support from Wyoming and West Virginia, the two largest coal-producing states; in 2024 he won them by margins of 46 and 42 points, respectively. But what did the residents of coal communities get in Trump’s first term for the votes they gave him? The same thing they’ll get in his second term: nothing. We are never going back to the days when hundreds of thousands of people worked in the mines, and anyone who says we can — including the president — is lying. It’s a lie many people would like to believe, which is understandable. But four years from now, they’ll have nothing but another handful of broken promises.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
