Economic Promises a President Trump Could (and Couldn’t) Keep

Much of what Donald Trump vows to accomplish in his first 100 days, if elected, is not feasible. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have room to maneuver.

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In the hills and hollows of Mingo County, W.Va., where unemployment is nearly triple the national average, it’s coal. On the southwest side of Chicago, where the landscape couldn’t be more different but the economic fears are much the same, it’s Oreo cookies. Elsewhere, it is cars, computers and air-conditioners.

And whether it is through rolling back regulations, imposing tariffs or making some none-too-discreet phone calls from the Oval Office to the C-suites, Donald J. Trump has vowed to bring back the vanishing jobs of miners, bakers and assembly-line workers, beginning on Day 1 of his administration.

“It’s going to happen fast,” Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, recently told a cheering crowd in Charleston, W.Va. “This is so easy.”

If only that were true.

For all of the appeal his message might have for residents there (Mr. Trump captured almost 90 percent of the vote in Mingo County), much of what he is promising to do — on his own, and through congressional legislation — couldn’t be accomplished in the first 1,000 days of a Trump administration, much less the first 100.

For example, Mr. Trump has suggested easing clean-air regulations enacted by Democrats and Republicans alike that have hurt the coal industry. But King Coal is unlikely to ever recapture market share lost in recent years to natural gas made cheap by the fracking boom, not to mention fast-growing alternative energy sources like wind and solar.

Nor could Mr. Trump, a billionaire businessman, force steel makers to buy coal from Appalachia to heat furnaces in Asia, Europe and North America that have been idled by weak demand.

“I will not say he can’t do anything, but it’s very unlikely he’ll be able to restore coal to where it was,” said John Deskins, director of the West Virginia University Bureau of Business and Economic Research.

Of course, a Trump presidency is far from certain. And any president’s sway over the national economy is debatable.

But a big part of what has gotten Mr. Trump this far are his outsize promises. And while the case of coal and clean air illustrates the limits of a president’s power in the economic arena, there are other places where Mr. Trump would have considerably more room to maneuver.

Like much of his speechifying, Mr. Trump’s economic and business agenda is a mixture of opening bids and dog-whistle messages as well as some nuts-and-bolts proposals he might be able to put in effect as president, even without congressional approval. Sorting out what’s what, though, isn’t simple or safe.

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