Playing With Fire: What Trump—and the Left—Still Don’t Understand About Coal Country

Earlier this month, Donald Trump signed four executive orders aimed at revitalizing the U.S. coal industry. Once the world’s top producer, U.S. coal output has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, becoming a symbol of the disillusionment and anger around deindustrialization that remains the lifeblood of Trump’s MAGA movement.

Trump justified the orders by citing national energy security—China is now the world’s top coal producer—and rising electricity demands due to the growth of AI and electric vehicle production. He also claimed, erroneously, that coal is “cheap” and “efficient.”

But beyond policy, Trump’s invocation of coal taps into something deeper. It’s not just about energy. It’s about memory. Coal represents a symbol of “better days” in the minds of many Americans who live outside the Beltway or coastal blue cities. And nowhere does this resonance strike more clearly than in Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA)—once a bastion of hard anthracite coal mining, where hundreds of thousands of impoverished European immigrants arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries to work the mines, including my own family from southern Italy.

To many on the left, Trump’s talk of coal is laughable—an empty promise rooted in a vanished world. But underneath the nostalgia is something profoundly real. Trump’s coal rhetoric taps into a collective memory where coal once formed the bedrock of community and identity—a memory that has been relentlessly mocked, even as it continues to shape political reality.

As Ben Bradlee Jr. wrote in The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changes America, “They feel like everyone’s punching bag, and that their way of life is dying.” This is where the MAGA movement began. It’s also where my family’s story began, in Luzerne County, which Bradlee profiled. It’s a region shaped by defiance, resilience, and a submerged identity that still burns. The people who feel drawn to Trump aren’t simply imagining something lost—they’re remembering something true, even if buried beneath contradiction.

That history shines light on a host of modern-day issues, with messages for Trump supporters, his detractors, and the oligarchic class—including Trump himself.

These miners weren’t reading Marx—they were reading each other.

Trump supporters, for instance, might be surprised to learn just how radical coal country once was. In the late 1800s and early 20th century, anthracite coal country was no place for docility. Mining was brutal—likely the most deadly job in America. In NEPA alone, an estimated 35,000 men and boys died in the mines. Deaths occurred nearly every day, often in multiples. Thousands more lost limbs to falling rock or their eyesight to fire and pit blasts.

Mine owners often subcontracted operations to middlemen, suppressing wages and pitting workers against each other. This system opened the door to mafia influence and entrenched political corruption. Yet labor militancy in the region was fierce. Militant Irishmen known as the Molly Maguires bombed and assassinated mine bosses when demands were ignored. Later, socialist and anarchist movements like the IWW—the “Wobblies”—won mass support. Wildcat strikes were common.

At times, less ideologically driven groups like the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) led massive, coordinated shutdowns of anthracite production, threatening the nation’s winter fuel supply and prompting presidential intervention. These miners weren’t reading Marx—they were reading each other. And when someone got too close to power, they got thrown out.

There are also important lessons here for the left. Many, if not most, of the region’s immigrants weren’t considered white by the dominant culture. When a New York journalist came to profile NEPA miners, he described them emerging from the pits “blacker than any Africans,” covered in soot, and questioned their fitness to vote. African Americans, for various reasons, never settled in large numbers here. The population was almost entirely of European descent—yet racial identity in these places wasn’t black, white, or brown. It was sooty gray.

Italians, Irish, Slovaks, Lithuanians—none of them were white yet. Their pain wasn’t legible to elites then, and in many ways, it still isn’t. As historian Thomas Dublin has noted, “The story of American immigration is writ large in the region.” Nearly two dozen ethnic groups worked the mines, each considered their own “race.” The federal Dillingham Commission ranked them by desirability, with “South Italians” often dead last. In towns like Pittston, where my family settled, this dynamic boiled over in 1908, when two thousand Anglo-American residents marched to burn down the “Italian Colony” and lynch Italian suspects in a crime. It was a race riot.

And yet, in this complex setting, Italian immigrant leaders were often the ones fighting mafia infiltration and resisting subcontracting schemes that aligned criminal groups with mine owners.

This complex history contradicts simplistic liberal narratives that view coal nostalgia as simply being about privileged white workers clinging to lost supremacy. These workers weren’t privileged—they were the bottom rung. It wasn’t just about jobs, but about the tight bonds that came with them. Historians like John Bodnar have written about the “family economy,” where work, responsibility, and emotional support were shared across generations. Defiance wasn’t just ideological. It was communal. It was familial.

These bonds created a kind of psychic shield against brutal exploitation—a lived memory of solidarity that today’s institutional left fails to connect with. Democrats speak the language of policy and representation, but they don’t speak to this emotional grammar. To many in NEPA, Trump isn’t just about God or guns—he represents a feeling of protection, a yearning for a world where people looked out for each other.

It’s worth remembering, too, that this region was once held as a strategic asset by the industrial titans of the day—people like J.P. Morgan. And yet, coal country never celebrated the mega-wealthy. Trump today evokes a past in which people like him—the owners, the brokers—were squarely seen as the enemy. If he truly wants to channel the spirit of coal country, he should recall that when people here sensed a rat or a traitor, they threw the bums out.

In 1928, after a string of bombings and assassinations tied to mafia-mine owner collusion, Pittston’s mayor William Gillespie issued a warning that might as well serve as a metaphor for the region writ large: “The conditions that prevail in Pittston now might be looked upon as a volcano. It is not ejecting lava or smoke at present… but the fire is not extinguished. There is bitterness. There is hatred existing there to a greater extent than most people realize.”

But also love. And also community. And to whatever extent Trump, his supporters, and his critics fail to recognize the depths of this memory—they are playing with fire.