As you may have heard, the presidential campaign of Donnie Trump, alleged multibillionaire, is broke. Well, not quite broke. Papers filed with the Federal Election Commission showed the campaign at the end of May had less than $1.3 million on hand and had only raised $3.1 million for the month. Pitiful for a candidate less than five months from Election Day. More so considering that the usual big donors for Republicans have shied away from putting their money into this crumbling project.
But Trump has at least one pal willing to help him out. It’s Bob Murray, arguably the last of the coal barons worthy of the name, owner of Murray Energy Corporation, the nation’s No. 1 producer of underground coal. Next Tuesday, candidate Trump will be in Wheeling, West Virginia, for an invitation-only fundraiser that Murray is organizing. Surprise! A list of invitees hasn’t been released to the media.
Trump has promised to bring back coal jobs by rolling back environmental regulations, and such talk helped him scoop up 77 percent of the vote in the West Virginia Republican primary vote.
But choosing the likes of Murray to put some cash into his run for the presidency ought to cost Trump the vote of every single coal miner in the state.
It was Murray who bullshitted in 2007 about what had happened at his subsidiary’s Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, where six miners and three rescuers died after a cave-in. The federal government issued the highest fine ever—$1.85 million—against the Crandall operations for mine safety violations. Government investigators noted that Murray’s claim the cave-in was the result of a natural earthquake was bogus. Instead, the government said, an overly aggressive use of retreat mining, which consists of removing pillars of coal and retreating toward the mine entrance, had caused the earthquake. They also noted that Murray had withheld information about that technique. That is, he lied.
This was scarcely the only instance of Murray’s safety violations, whether in Utah, West Virginia, or Ohio, where the company mines more coal than any other.
Millions of dollars in federal fines continue to be levied against the company’s operations, as they have for years. Murray has also sought to shut up whistleblowers who have challenged various methods the company and its subsidiaries have engaged in to avoid being reported for safety violations. He has repeatedly labeled safety violations trivial and and lobbied against safety rules.
Trump isn’t the first Republican presidential candidate Murray has backed. Four years ago, he commanded miners to show up as a backdrop for a Mitt Romney appearance. Capping insult with injury, they had to give up a day’s pay to do it.
Murray and the West Virginia Coal Association seem to seriously think Trump will revive coal’s fortunes. That ain’t gonna happen no matter how much money they raise for Trump—and it’s likely to be a piddling amount compared to what he needs.