The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post site July 10, 2017:
On the campaign trail, few groups of workers were mentioned more often by candidate Donald Trump than coal miners. Factba.se, which indexes every speech and tweet of the president’s, tallied 294 total references to coal miners over time. By contrast, Trump only mentioned doctors 94 times, despite the issue of health care being prominent in politics over the past few years.
In one sense, it’s easy to see why. The coal industry has shed thousands of employees over the past few years, with the number of people working in the coal mining industry declining by more than 41 percent since Barack Obama took office in January 2008. (The overall mining and logging industry — which includes oil drilling — fared better, shedding only 6 percent of its jobs.) Continue reading “Why is Trump more worried about coal miners than department store employees?”