One must admit the cruelty, really. If you set out to design a cartoonishly villainous assault on Colorado specifically, you could hardly do worse than shitting in their coal and water in the same week. It’s as if someone studied the state seal, noted the pickaxe and the mountains, and thought: attack.
The coal situation achieves a kind of particular insult to Coloradans. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fracking CEO who donated $228,390 to Trump’s campaign and once swallowed fracking fluid on camera to fake its safety, has ordered a coal plant to remain open under emergency powers. The emergency does not exist. The grid doesn’t need the power. The plant itself is currently broken, after a critical part failed on December 19th, and produces nothing at all. Rural Colorado ratepayers will spend millions on “repairs”, then $85 million annually operating it, to generate electricity priced higher than alternatives nearly 100% of the time.
Peak Cruelty
The massive corruption for an undeserving beneficiary is not difficult to identify.
Two-thirds of that $85 million is fuel costs, paid to Trapper Mine, whose sole customer is this plant. The “emergency order” is a coal subsidy dressed in the language of grid reliability. This is Wright’s sixth such order – plants in Indiana, Michigan, Washington, Pennsylvania – suggesting less an emergency than a policy of preventing market forces from retiring coal under any circumstances.
Unpotable
The water situation is, if anything, more instructive. Trump vetoed the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act – a sixty-year-old project to deliver clean drinking water to 50,000 people in southeastern Colorado, where the groundwater is contaminated with radioactivity. The bill passed the House by voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the federal cost at under half a million dollars.
Trump’s stated rationale was utter nonsense. Eighty-five million for unnecessary coal from a dead site: “emergency” infrastructure. Just a half million for potable water to 50,000 people: a sudden taxpayer burden claim.
One does not need to be a student of logic to notice the hate for humanity behind the asymmetry.
The bill’s sponsor was a Trump loyalist Lauren Boebert. It was, by most accounts, the most significant legislation of her congressional career. However, six weeks earlier she had been summoned to the White House Situation Room and pressured to remove her name from the discharge petition forcing release of Jeffrey Epstein’s DOJ files. She declined to kiss the Epstein child trafficker ring. The Trump-Epstein disclosure bill passed 427-1. Thomas Massie described what they overcame: “We fought the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, the speaker of the House and the vice president.”
Boebert herself has raised the possibility that the veto was retaliation.
“I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability,” she said, in the manner of someone who believes precisely the opposite.
Colorado, it should be noted, also refused to release election-tampering convict Tina Peters after Trump’s pardon. A pardon that is fraud as it does not apply to state crimes. The state has managed to become a target of the Trump family on multiple fronts.
The Scorpion
Rural Coloradans who voted for Trump three times will now subsidize overpriced and unneeded coal to enrich executives of a plant that doesn’t work, while drinking water is left dangerously contaminated because half a million dollars for health was deemed a waste of money by Trump. The coal industry receives an $85 million handout from taxpayers laundered through abuse of emergency powers. A loyalist who defected on a single vote, and cared about children, watches her signature achievement destroyed.
This is not governance.
It is not even competent grift.
It is the behavior of a very sick man who is proving consequences do not apply to him, like a cartoon villain with no redeeming qualities.
This is a giant T burning on the lawns of Colorado.
The cruelty is the point. America is being recast as the bad cowboy. What would Captain Silas Soule say?
