Donald Trump during a MAGA rally on October 10, 2016 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

In the past, some MAGA Republicans tried to promote President Donald Trump's energy policy by equating fossil fuels with manliness and claiming that green energy is unmanly. That talking point drew scathing criticism from liberals and progressives, who attacked it as being just plain dumb. Yet it was echoed in parts of the Manosphere.

In 2025, however, a new talking point promoting Trump's support of fossil fuels, including coal, emerged: one equating coal with a strong woman. And in her August 13 column, The Guardian's Arwa Mahdawi examines MAGA's "co-opting" of feminist and LGBTQ rhetoric in order to endorse coal use.

On July 31, the Trump-era U.S. Department of Energy tweeted a coal picture and posted, "She's an icon She's a legend And she is the moment."

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That phrase, Mahdawi notes, is "co-opting a phrase adopted by the LGBTQ+ community."

"Why is the Trump Administration, which seems to think women are objects, so keen on personifying coal?," Mahdawi writes. "Is it for poetic effect? Or are they trying to sanitize the deadly impact of coal pollution and associate it with Mother Nature?"

The Guardian columnist stresses that MAGA's rhetoric doesn't make fossil fuels any less deadly.

"This comes as the Trump Administration devotes considerable energy to making fossil fuels great again," Mahdawi observes. "The president has signed numerous executive orders aimed at 'Reinvigorating America's Beautiful Clean Coal Industry' and reversed Biden-era pollution regulations on coal-fired power plants. These plants, according to a 2023 report, killed at least 460,000 Americans over the past two decades."

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The columnist continues, "Deaths declined when the environmental regulations that Donald Trump is so scornful of were put in place…. As for the weird social media post gendering coal? It feels like a smokescreen to get people chattering online as the world burns."

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Arwa Mahdawi's full column for The Guardian is available at this link.