The American economy added a mere 98,000 jobs last month, less than half the number expected. Not good enough for President Trump, who not only wants more jobs: He wants them for coal miners and those horny handed sons of toil who once were the backbone of the American manufacturing work force. To get jobs for miners he is conducting a bonfire of environmental regulations. To get manufacturing jobs he urged Chinese president Xi Jinping at their Mar-a-Lago meeting to abandon the unfair trade practices that have contributed to the hollowing out of the US manufacturing sector. Unfortunately, torching anti-coal regulations and haranguing Xi won’t move Trump’s jobs agenda significantly forward.

Start with the coal miners. “My administration is putting an end to the war on coal,” the President announced when signing an order to unwind the regulatory web his predecessor spun around the mining and use of coal. Unfortunately, Trump can huff and puff and blow all the Obama regulations down, but he will generate no more than a handful of mining jobs. Between 2000 and 2016 production of coal in the U.S. declined by 40 percent, its share of fuels used by electricity generators from 50 percent to 30 percent, and the number of miners from over 70,000 to around 50,000. That decline will continue, for two reasons.