Donald Trump’s failed coal policy

The following editorial appeared in the New York Daily News:

Amid all the chaos, corruption and cruelty of the Donald Trump years, it’s easy to overlook that, just judged by conventional criteria, this president is a bad manager, leader and politician. Even by the promises that he set for himself four years ago, he falls short and doesn’t deserve re-election.

In 2016, Trump went into coal country — West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Wyoming, Montana, Pennsylvania and the like — boasting that not only would Hillary Clinton destroy coal jobs, but that “We’re gonna put the miners back to work. We’re gonna get those mines open.”

Four years later, how’s that looking ? Not only did Trump’s policies not bring coal jobs back, but America is home to more than 1,000 fewer coal jobs than there were four years ago. Which was entirely predictable: Coal consumption has decreased for 14 years in a row — caught between renewable energy costs plunging and natural gas being a cheaper and cleaner option. Not surprisingly, that trend has accelerated in 2020 due to the pandemic.

In Trump’s four years, the values of the top five coal producers have all collapsed, despite environmentally ruinous regulatory rollbacks the president touts as unleashing an economy long shackled by Democrats. In other words, Trump has worked to make businesses less safe and the air less clean in the name of sending a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry that never materialized.

Coal workers are left not with better prospects but with the bitter taste of a Music Man who promised great things and a bright future he probably knew all along he could never deliver.

Promises made, country broken.