Following is a satirical piece I wrote in December last year about President-Elect Trump’s brilliant strategy for revitalizing the coal industry in America.

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I recently got an accidental glimpse of the pure genius of the man who will be our next President. It seems that Trump challenged one of his Russian hackers to access his strategic plans to make America great again. It was a skills test for a position at the NSA. The candidate succeeded in acquiring the plan outlining Trump’s intentions for reviving the American coal industry. But then, apparently because of name confusion, I got it instead of the intended Trump team recipient. I suppose he won’t get the job now even though he did a good job of hacking!

Regardless of how I came by it I was astounded by its content! The President-elect is simply brilliant!! His approach will certainly revive coal, create millions of high paying jobs in the process, and even throw those environmental idiots off balance. I think we’re going to see another miracle, probably equaling, if not exceeding, his election.

A little known fact not lost on Trump is that the seeds of the coal industry decline were sown more than a century ago. In 1908 the US Navy began implementing a program of converting its capital ships from coal to oil-fired. The typical battleship of the time required more than 200 crew members to keep the coal-fired boilers operating. An oil-fired battleship only needed 24 crew members for the same function.

As the Navy’s coal to oil conversion progressed, thousands of crew members were no longer needed on Navy ships and a similar number of miners were relieved of jobs mining the coal that the Navy no longer burned. That initial decline has been accelerated in recent decades with renewable energy sources and the availability of cheap natural gas. But now Trump is going to reverse all that!!

Trump’s plan is to reconvert all Naval vessels back to coal. Coal mining will explode! Plus the additional firemen and coal handlers needed for a coal powered fleet will be enormous! He is specifying that the new workforce be US energy company employees contracted to the Navy for shipboard duties. That by itself will create thousands of private sector coal industry jobs. And because the Navy has a worldwide footprint, American companies will be contracted to establish and operate coaling stations around the world and to transport coal mined in the US to those overseas stations. That translates into more shipping and handling jobs for Americans in addition to the coal mining and fleet operations jobs. WOW!! Could it possibly get any better??

Well yes, actually! Besides reconversion, Trump plans call for dramatically increasing the number of ships in the US Navy as well. That means still more coal mining, transportation, and consumption. There will be coal industry jobs for everyone!! We may not even care anymore about deporting Latinos! That should placate those “bleeding heart liberals”!

If you’re worried about offsetting losses of oil industry jobs, don’t fret! Most existing capital ships are nuclear powered, so reconversion will hardly affect oil consumption. Further, the strong friendship our new President and Secretary of State share with Russian President Putin will serve American and Russian oil company interests very well under leaders who see eye to eye. That is yet another economic and diplomatic windfall from President-elect Trump’s business genius, and having friends in appropriate places!

As a side benefit the new Administration hopes that his plan will create disorganization, or even a split, among environmentalists. Reconversion to coal will lead to scrapping hundreds of the nuclear power plants currently powering Navy ships. Through social media the new President wants to spread disinformation to prompt different environmental groups to fight with each other. He intends to amplify and exploit the natural differences that will exist among those groups over the tradeoffs between eliminating nuclear power plants and burning more fossil fuel.

The political brilliance of Trump’s plan just keeps getting better. Since the coal will be consumed by ships on the high seas, any degradation of air quality from burning more fossil fuel will be spread fairly evenly around the planet rather than concentrate in American cities and industrial centers. That will give environmental cover for Congress and make it harder for the climate change doomsday prophets to influence voters.

This one energy policy initiative must just be the tip of the iceberg. Imagine what ingenious solutions our new President has up his sleeve for solving other desperate challenges our country faces. As he has said himself repeatedly: “Only I can fix it”!! Clearly Donald Trump is America’s 21st century messiah!!!