The first time Donald J. Trump ran for president, he slapped on a miner’s helmet and told coal workers they would be “winning, winning, winning” when he entered the White House.
Now, as Mr. Trump campaigns for another chance at the presidency, he rarely mentions America’s coal miners and has stopped making grand promises about their future.
The shift reflects political and economic realities, experts said. Top among them: Mr. Trump oversaw coal’s decline, not its salvation. Despite the fact that Mr. Trump gutted climate regulations and appointed a coal lobbyist to lead the country’s top environmental agency, 75 coal-fired power plants closed and the industry shed about 13,000 jobs during his presidency.
“Not a single coal miner went back to work or power plant saved,” said Erin E. Bates, a spokeswoman for the United Mine Workers of America, the labor organization representing coal miners.
“I think he’s realizing those promises were not met during his term and they’re probably not going to be met now,” she said. “Politically, it probably doesn’t pay for his campaign to make more broken promises.”
Two decades ago, coal produced about half of all the electricity in the United States. Today, it accounts for just 16 percent of American power generation. The industry employed nearly 180,000 people at its peak in the 1980s, but now that figure is about 44,800, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Coal began its slide around 2005 as the fracking boom started to produce large quantities of cheap natural gas, which proved attractive to utilities. In the last few years, the cost of power generated by wind turbines and solar farms has plunged, replacing natural gas as the cheapest source of electricity. Last year, power generated from onshore wind turbines and solar farms was about one-third of the cost of the electricity produced by coal, on average.
Strict new limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants announced in April by the Environmental Protection Agency are likely to make the country’s 200 or so remaining coal plants even more expensive to operate. Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels and, despite its decline, it is responsible for more than half the planet-warming emissions produced by the power sector in the United States.
The only specific new campaign pledge Mr. Trump has made about coal is to unwind the new E.P.A. limits on pollution from the power plants, which industry leaders say are impossible to satisfy.
Rolling back the regulation would help the industry, but would still not restore coal to its glory days. “The truth is, no candidate is going to be able to do much to save the coal industry when utilities are moving away from coal,” Ms. Bates said.
Mr. Trump’s energy agenda largely consists of aggressively promoting oil and gas, the burning of which is driving climate change. He has suggested he would quickly approve new oil and gas pipelines, expand oil drilling on public land and in federal waters and permit drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. He has promised to end federal support for electric vehicles, and wind power, which he has falsely claimed “kill all our birds.” And he would withdraw the country, again, from the 2015 Paris climate accord. (He did so during his term in the White House but President Biden rejoined the global agreement to limit warming.)
“To keep pace with the world economy,” his campaign website says, “President Trump will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
When Mr. Trump does talk about coal, it’s in the context of competition from China and to suggest that the United States is wasting time and money on renewable energy, according to a review of his speeches. “They’re opening up a coal plant every single week while we struggle with wind,” he said in April.
Since declaring his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race, Mr. Trump has mentioned coal miners only once at his rallies, to say: “We want clean coal. We want to take care of our miners.”
Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which supports the fossil fuel industry, noted that Democrats, too, are talking less about coal than they did in 2016, when President Barack Obama’s plan to rein in coal plants was the centerpiece of his climate agenda.
When Mr. Biden references coal these days, he speaks about federal funds to create clean energy jobs in former coal communities.
Coal has also dropped from the spotlight because the swing states that both candidates need to win in 2024, like Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan, are not considered coal states. “The conversation in the energy and climate space has shifted more toward oil and gas,” Mr. Pyle said.
Some Republicans also note that Mr. Trump doesn’t need to discuss coal as much as he did in the past because he seems to have the locked up the vote in coal communities.
West Virginia, the second-largest coal-producing state, behind Wyoming, was once a Democratic stronghold but has shifted solidly Republican in recent elections. Its senior senator, Joe Manchin III, has left the Democratic Party to register as an independent and is not running for re-election. The man who hopes to succeed Mr. Manchin in the Senate is Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican coal executive and an ally of Mr. Trump’s in West Virginia.
“There’s really no constituency left for coal in the Democratic Party post-Joe Manchin,” said Neil Chatterjee, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Mr. Trump who once served as an aide to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky.
“Trump’s got the coal vote so there’s really not an imperative to go for it,” Mr. Chatterjee said. “He’s still going to rail against E.P.A. regulations and regulatory overreach and the Biden administration energy policies, but he can do all that without specifically focusing on coal because the working class, United Mine Worker voters, they’ve all come to the Republican Party.”
The United Mine Workers has not endorsed a presidential candidate since 2008, when the union backed Mr. Obama, Ms. Bates said. But she said many coal workers were most likely supporters of Mr. Trump.
Another factor that energy analysts said could be shaping Mr. Trump’s energy outlook: Some of coal’s biggest boosters are either no longer on the political scene or are playing a smaller role than they once did.
For example, Robert E. Murray, a billionaire who built the country’s largest privately held coal mining company before it went bankrupt in 2019, died in 2020. Mr. Murray was a longtime supporter of Mr. Trump, hosted fund-raisers for him as a candidate and donated $300,000 to his inauguration. A few weeks later, Mr. Murray presented Mr. Trump with detailed requests for the new administration aimed at “getting America’s coal miners back to work.” Mr. Trump fulfilled most of those wishes but it did not revive the industry.
Mr. McConnell, who was once Mr. Trump’s most important ally on Capitol Hill and credited their teamwork with ending the Obama administration’s “war on coal,” has been feuding with the former president since he condemned Mr. Trump following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. That relationship may have started to thaw on Thursday when Mr. Trump met with Mr. McConnell and other Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Still, no one contests that the coal industry has lost its sway.
“I don’t see coal having the same political muscle that it had,” said George David Banks, who served as a White House senior adviser on energy in the Trump administration. “It’s atrophied.”
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting from New York.
