Donald Trump signed executive orders on Tuesday in a brazen attempt to prop up the soon-to-be-extinct coal industry. The move is yet another step toward deregulation so that the Trump administration can pollute our air and water and ruin our federal lands. 

In addition to dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency and eliminating dozens of regulations restricting the amount of pollution coal plants are allowed to pump into the air and waterways, Trump’s orders will open public land for more mining and halt the planned closures of economically unviable coal plants. 

“One thing I learned about the coal miners, that’s what they want to do,” Trump said, while deriding the notion of training coal miners to do tech jobs. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in a different kind of a job, and they’d be unhappy. They want a mine. Coal. That’s what they love to do.”

Considering that the White House has claimed these welfare handouts for the fossil fuel industry are meant to help meet the energy demands of artificial intelligence data centers, Trump’s condescending posture toward coal workers transitioning to tech jobs is laughably cynical.

Trump made the announcement at the White House, where he was “flanked by more than two-dozen coal miners wearing hard hats,” according to The Washington Post. That represents a good chunk of the coal miners remaining in West Virginia at this point. 

Coal mining is one of the hardest, most unhealthy jobs in the world. Rates of pneumoconiosis, or “black lung disease,” have risen again exactly because of the first Trump administration’s tireless efforts to deregulate worker protections in the industry.

But West Virginians still love to vote for Trump—even though he loves to spit in their faces every time. His tariff plans and trade war with China threaten to kill what little is left of the coal industry, and West Virginia farmers are now victims of Trump and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s illegal austerity measures. 

It is a lesson West Virginians should have learned in 2016, after voting for Trump and helping to secure a GOP majority. That year, retired West Virginian coal miners were left holding the bag as the GOP and Trump failed to secure their health benefits and treatment.

Former West Virginia governor and sitting Sen. Jim Justice is one Republican who is definitely happy about Trump’s plans to send taxpayer money to coal CEOs’ bank accounts. Justice’s family owns coal mines, and over the last few years he has admitted that the flailing industry has left him in debt to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But even as the coal industry dies, the Trump administration continues to push policies that benefit the top 1% of business owners, leaving the rest of us to suffer the environmental consequences. 

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