If it’s Hillary Clinton on the stump, she’ll talk about job retraining, new infrastructure, and better education. But if it’s Donald Trump, the answer is simple: He promises to bring jobs back, and punish those who sent them away.
.. Trump tends to focus on what he identifies as the problem—how America has been wronged and who is to blame. Jobs went overseas? End NAFTA. Worried about terror? Ban Muslims. The solution is usually simple: Just stop doing whatever the U.S. was doing before. The community will prosper.
.. His plan is very easy to envision: You’ll have your job back, and your old lives. This is the power of Trump’s blame-based worldview. When curing a community’s malaise is as simple as getting rid of the bad actor who caused it—in this case, Obama’s environmental regulations—the rewards feel more certain, more tangible.
.. The problem is that Trump’s plan has almost no chance of success. A U.S. president has no power to stoke global demand for coal, or pump up the price of natural gas; the most Trump could do is repeal Obama’s environmental rules, and economists agree that would have a minimal effect on employment.