President Donald Trump professed his admiration of miners Tuesday night at his Poconos rally, contending the brave workers are so enamored of their profession that Trump wouldn’t be able to convince them to swap jobs with anyone — including himself.
“I love miners. … They wouldn’t trade jobs with me if I gave them a beautiful, magnificent penthouse in the middle of Manhattan, where I used to live — if I gave them the most beautiful penthouse — they wouldn’t take it,” Trump told the crowd at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono.
“They’d rather go 10,000 feet underground and dig. That’s what they want.”
Can that be true?
Trump has long extolled the virtues of “beautiful, clean coal,” as he calls it, during nearly a decade of campaigning in the Keystone State.
But would miners really prefer to toil in the damp darkness, somewhere between the buried dead and the devil, rather than run the free world in a clean blue suit, with access to a lavish high-rise in the gorgeous sunshine they forsake eight hours a day?
“Yes, of course,” said Edmund Neidlinger, 75, a fourth-generation coal miner who dug black Pennsylvania anthracite in Schuylkill County and its environs for 40 years. He now works as mine foreman at the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, a Scranton tourist attraction.
“If I was offered any other job when I was mining, I would have turned it down,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have traded the life I led for a penthouse. No way.”
There is, Neidlinger believes, a passion just a few special people hold toward working with a band of headlamped brothers, risking entrapment, methane explosions, black lung from dust, and cave-echoing machine noise down in an inky coal seam to perform the ninth-most-dangerous job in the world (logging is the riskiest), as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration tells it.
“You fall in love with this job,” Neidlinger said. “Very few people can do it. Most miners feel like it’s in their blood.”
While it’s not in his veins, Trump has made coal mining a big part of his energy policy. The industry is declining, experts say, but he has signed executive orders to expand it, and has opened up new land for mining while directing agencies to scotch regulations that “discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation,” as one presidential order reads.
Not everyone agrees that tempting miners to abandon their coal mines would be all that difficult.
“I’m sure the average miner would turn down a jet plane, private island, and gold-plated toilet, too!” said a sarcastic Mark Ferguson, cofounder of Woodshed: An Appalachian Joint, an online magazine dedicated to the culture of the region responsible for an immensity of U.S. coal mined over the centuries.
Cautioning people not to romanticize the lore and lure of mining, Ferguson pointed out that “folks here literally had to go war with mining companies to be paid in real U.S. currency, not scrip that could only be used at the company store.
“They know the value of a dollar, and sure as hell wouldn’t turn a penthouse down.”
The thing about mining you have to understand is, for most people, it starts out as a job you have to do, said Bob Black, 68, who dug coal for half a century in Allegheny County.
As a young man, Black wanted to be a teacher, but after his father died, Black set the dream aside and descended into the earth to work at the higher-paying job to support the family.
“You go into the mine, blink your eyes, and you’ve been doing it for 30 years,” Black said. “By then, you can’t imagine doing anything else.”
There were “days you hate, and days you love,” said Black, who ultimately became a mine manager. “Every ex-miner would tell you they miss fighting Mother Nature — like when the roof falls in, or when you’re dealing with water coming in,” he said. “You can’t run to Ace Hardware for help. You find solutions.”
What you remember most, though, is the company of soot-faced guys, he said.
“It’s like a city down there, with 250 men working, spread out over 15 miles,” Black said.
“The camaraderie. That’s what I miss most.”
So does Black think Trump was right? Would he have refused to trade 50 years of fellowship and labor in perpetual midnight for anything in the world?
“Oh, no,” Black said. “I’d have taken the penthouse. For sure.”
Staff writer Julia Terruso contributed to this article.
