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.........

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