The Trump Voters Who Want to Be Lied to

Even after all this time, voters in Kentucky line up for lies and broken promises.

On Tuesday, Rep. Andy Barr — whose last appearance here involved an ad he ran bravely declaring “It’s not a sin to be white. It’s not against the law to be male. And it shouldn’t be disqualifying to be a Christian” — rose above the fact that he is one of Congress’ most notorious nincompoops to win the Republican nomination to replace retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell. Because it’s Kentucky, which Donald Trump won by 30 points in 2024, Barr will probably win the general election too.

Prompted by that result, I mentioned a story involving Barr and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Bluesky, and since the post went somewhat viral, I thought it might be worth elaborating on, since the subject of their argument — coal and workers who used to mine it — is particularly relevant given both the Iran war and the fact that Donald Trump is simultaneously spiraling politically and showing his continued hold on his party’s base. It’s a story about energy, but more importantly it’s a story about how politicians can lie to their supporters — blatantly, obviously, repeatedly — and be rewarded for it.

The story of Andy Barr and AOC

Our tale begins in 2019, when in a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee, Barr stood up for the coal miners in his district against Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal, a proposal to transition away from fossil fuels and invest in renewables. AOC should come to his district, Barr said, and “I invite her to go underground with me and meet the men and women who do heroic work to power the American economy, and I would invite the gentlelady to come to eastern Kentucky and meet the coal miners who will tell you what the Green New Deal would mean for their families, their paychecks.”

Ocasio-Cortez immediately replied, “I’d be happy to go to Kentucky, and I’d also like to note that in the Green New Deal, one of the things that I advocate for is fully funding the pensions of coal miners in West Virginia and throughout Appalachia because we want a just transition to make sure that we’re investing in jobs across those swaths of the country.” This seemed to take Barr by surprise, because shortly afterward, he said he was retracting the invitation unless AOC apologized to another congressman, Dan Crenshaw, for her “lack of civility” in a tweet she sent criticizing Crenshaw for his criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar (and by the way, AOC’s tweet was perfectly civil).

The whole Uh…I meant you can’t come until you apologize to my buddy for this totally unrelated thing! was obviously just a lame excuse, since Barr clearly didn’t think she’d take him up on his insincere offer. But the story doesn’t end there, because it turned out there were no active coal mines in Barr’s district. Picture them driving around the district together for hours, as an increasingly sweaty Barr says “Boy are those coal miners going to give you a piece of their mind when we find them! They’ve gotta be around here somewhere…”

You might think a fervent coal advocate like Andy Barr would know whether there were any active mines in his district. But as I said, he’s a nincompoop.

Fast forward to today, and there’s a whole section on Barr’s Senate campaign website about how he and Donald Trump are going to bring back all the lost coal jobs, a promise Trump has been making since 2016.

Has Trump kept that promise? You’ll never guess the answer.

The coal jobs are never coming back

Let’s be clear about one thing: In both of his terms, Trump absolutely tried to revive coal. He has waged an all-out war on renewable energy, and has gone so far as ordering utilities to keep coal plants open that they were planning to close, literally forcing states to keep burning coal against their will.

This is being done in the name of both nonsensical “energy dominance” and saving those precious, precious coal jobs. But the reason Trump hasn’t been able to bring back the coal jobs is that for all people talk in coal country about Barack Obama and Joe Biden waging a “war on coal,” federal regulation isn’t why those jobs disappeared.

Coal employment declined for two main reasons. The first is automation; modern coal mines just don’t require that many workers. The second is competition from natural gas and renewables, which are now as cheap or cheaper than coal. The bargain on coal used to be that yes, it’s terribly polluting and dangerous for workers, but it’s worth it because it’s so much cheaper than the alternatives. That’s no longer true.

Because there are so few coal jobs left, and coal has become such an automated industry, Trump’s efforts to get America to burn more coal have had no effect on jobs. Here’s the big picture:

When Trump took office in 2017 there were 51,000 coal jobs in the entire country. When he left office four years later, there were 38,000 coal jobs. Then the number plateaued for a bit, and when he took office again in January 2025 there were 40,500 coal jobs; in April there were 38,700.

More Americans work at the Cheesecake Factory (48,000 at last count) than in the entire coal industry. But no politicians are shouting that it is vital to the future of America that we preserve our noble Cheesecake Factory jobs.

And what about in Andy Barr’s Kentucky, the heart of coal country? As in the nation as a whole, coal jobs there are in a long and steady decline. They may stay the same or even bump up for a year or two, but in general the number of coal miners just keeps going down. The state gathers quite a bit of data on the coal industry, so I’ve used what they have to make this chart:

Almost nine out of every ten coal jobs they had 35 years ago are gone. In the latest figures available (for the third quarter of 2025), there were just 3,843 Kentuckians working in coal, in a state of 4.6 million people. The mines that are left still make money for their owners, but that money isn’t flowing into people’s paychecks.

Which is, of course, an old story. People in coal country have been exploited for a long time, their labor extracted and their landscapes despoiled while all the wealth went to greedy capitalists who viewed them as something to be squeezed and then discarded. What they’re left with is communities that were built around coal and where coal is central to the place’s identity, but where no one, or almost no one, actually mines coal anymore.

That produces justifiable anger and despair, which can then be exploited by cynical politicians like Donald Trump and Andy Barr, who promise the return of jobs that are simply never coming back. Rather than helping people build a future, they offer people an obvious lie that the past can be restored.

But as repugnant as the behavior of pretty much every Republican is on this issue, you can’t excuse the voters themselves, who watch that promise get broken again and again, and keep handing their votes to the politicians they know are lying to them. It’s just stunning that in 2026, a Senate candidate like Andy Barr can say he’s going to “revive Kentucky coal jobs” and quote Donald Trump saying he’ll “put the miners back to work” without voters responding “How dare you lie to us again about this?”

And in the meantime, Trump has waged a genuine war on the coal miners that are left, undermining their health and safety in every way he can (Kim Kelly of In These Times has reported on this in detail).

So if we aren’t keeping coal alive for the jobs, then what are we doing? For Trump, the answer is, as always, entirely personal. He loves the idea that coal is manly and fiery and dirty, unlike that feminine renewable energy all those hippies like. And the mining areas of the country have repeatedly shown that when he lies to them, they’ll put on that MAGA hat and say “Maybe this time it’ll really happen.” The only difference between them and the suckers who bought into Trump University is that eventually, the latter group realized Trump had drained their bank accounts and given them nothing in return, and they stopped coming back for more. But Trump has conned the voters of coal country three times now with a promise he breaks every time, and if he could run in 2028, they’d line up to get fleeced again.

And they’re probably going to send Andy Barr to the Senate, where true to form he’ll make sure his constituents stay angry and poor, feeding them phantoms of the past while doing nothing to help them build a better future. Why would he do anything different, when this scam works so well?

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