Mining Memories with Donald Trump in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Coal provided a useful catalyst for political affect in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and in the first year of his presidency.Journalists analyzing Trump's election results have noted that coaldependent counties overwhelmingly supported Trump.In Harlan County, East Kentucky, where historically the formal economy is based on coal, Trump's vote share for the 2016 presidential election was 84.9% ("2016 Kentucky").One former coal miner declared, "I voted for Trump-I mean, a coal miner would be stupid not to" (qtd. in Paterson and Frazier).Trump won their support by promising to bring back coal mining jobs.Were it fulfilled, this promise would have real economic consequences in Harlan, where, between 1950 and 2016, employment of on-site personnel in the coal mining industry dropped from 13,619 people (Estep) to 764 ("Kentucky Quarterly Energy Report").Trump refuted efforts to demonize coal and ignored associations between job losses and automatized mining practices.Rhetorically, his resuscitation of King Coal paralleled his appeals to white identity; both relied on a nostalgia for a past that never existed, a past untouched by either the dust of coal itself or the wider issue of racialized violence in the United States.

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