Donald Trump was crowned the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” during a White House ceremony on Wednesday, during which the president received a trophy after ordering the US defense department to purchase billions of dollars’ worth of power from coal plants.
The award was reportedly granted by the Washington Coal Club, an advocacy group with financial ties to the coal industry.
James Grech, CEO of Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the US, presented Trump with the bronze trophy that depicts a coalminer donning headlamp and pick.
“We stand here today representing the thousands of coalminers across the country to express our deep gratitude to you, sir, for the actions you’ve taken to support our industry,” Grech said to Trump during the ceremony, which had more than a dozen coal executives and miners in attendance.
Several Republican lawmakers and cabinet members also attended the ceremony, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Lee Zeldin, and the secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, who are both staunch coal advocates.
The event marked Trump’s signing of an executive order directing the defense department to secure long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants for military installations and other “mission-critical facilities”.
“We’re going to be buying a lot of coal through the military now,” Trump said at the event. “Under our leadership, we’re becoming a massive energy exporter.
“We’re lifting up our hard-working American miners like nobody has ever done before,” he added.
At the event, Trump also announced that the Department of Energy would allocate $175m in funding to six projects to “modernize, retrofit and extend” the life of “coal-fired power plants that serve rural and remote communities” in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky.
The new executive order is the latest action in this administration’s effort to revive the US coal industry. In September, the White House announced that it would open 13.1m acres (5.3m hectares) of public land to coal mining and provide $625m for coal-fired power plants.
Coal, which is the most polluting and costly fossil fuel, has declined sharply in the US over the past three decades. According to the Energy Information Administration, US coal production in 2023 was less than half of its 2008 level, and coal plants generated only about 15% of US electricity in 2024, down from roughly 50% in 2000.
The award adds to a series of honors and gifts that Trump has received from business executives, world leaders, cabinet members and others since the start of his second term.
In December, the president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, awarded Trump the newly created “Fifa peace prize”, and in November a group of Swiss billionaires gave Trump a gold Rolex desk clock and a $130,000 engraved gold bar, after which Trump agreed to reduce tariffs on Switzerland.
Over the summer, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, gifted Trump an engraved glass disk statue with a base made from 24-karat gold. Soon after, the White House granted Apple an exemption from a 100% tariff on semiconductors.
