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 peak asshat. 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 – a critical part failed on December 19th – and produces nothing at all. Rural Colorado ratepayers will spend millions repairing it, then $85 million annually operating it, to generate electricity priced higher than alternatives 90% of the time.
The corruption of 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.
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 fiscal responsibility. Eighty-five million for unnecessary coal: emergency infrastructure. Half a million for potable water: taxpayer burden. One does not need to be a student of logic to notice the asymmetry.
The bill’s sponsor was Trump loyalist Lauren Boebert. It was, by most accounts, the most significant legislation of her congressional career. 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. The 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 sincerely hopes precisely the opposite.
Colorado, it should be noted, also refused to release election-tampering convict Tina Peters after Trump’s pardon – which does not apply to state crimes. The state has managed to irritate the administration on multiple fronts.
The synthesis is worth contemplating. Rural Coloradans who voted for Trump three times will now pay inflated rates for coal power they don’t need from a plant that doesn’t work, while drinking water contaminated with radioactivity because half a million dollars was too great a burden on the federal treasury. The coal industry receives an $85 million annual subsidy laundered through emergency powers. A loyalist who defected on a single vote watches her signature achievement destroyed.
This is not governance. It is not even competent grift. It is the behavior of a sick man who is proving consequences do not apply to him, like a cartoon villain with no redeeming qualities.
The cruelty is the point.
This is a giant T burning on the lawns of Colorado.
