Donald Trump and the Myth of the Coal Revival

On Tuesday, less than two weeks after the White House unveiled its “budget blueprint to make America great again,” which proposed to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding by $2.6 billion and lay off about a fifth of its workforce, President Trump took aim at the E.P.A. once more. On a dais in the Map Room of the agency’s D.C. headquarters, Trump gave a thirteen-minute-long speech celebrating “a new era in American energy,” as thirteen “incredible coal miners” stood silently at his side, like shy and stocky pageant contestants. They were the physical embodiment of this new era—white, middle-aged, clean-shaven, strong—which was about to be signed into existence with a sweeping executive order on energy and environmental policy. Mining is what they “want to do,” Trump said. “They love the job. I fully understand that. I grew up in a real-estate family, and until this recent little excursion into the world of politics I could never understand why anybody would not want to be in the world of real estate.” To put the miners “back to work,” the President announced, he was lifting the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands. He was also ordering a review of his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, that “crushing attack on American industry.”