Mascots are currently enjoying a renaissance. From McDonald’s Grimace to the WNBA’s Ellie the Elephant and Pop-Tarts’ Pop-Tart guy, companies everywhere are leaning on characters to represent their brand values and attract eyes on social media. Now the Trump administration is joining in with its own mascot. It’s a literal lump of coal.
The coal mascot—named “Coalie”—appears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Coalie officially debuted on January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted him (it?) on his X account.
In the post, which has now been viewed more than 37,000 times, Burgum shared an obviously AI-generated illustration of himself kneeling next to a grinning, bug-eyed piece of coal that’s decked out in a yellow coal miner’s helmet, vest, and boots. The caption, in part, read “Mine, Baby, Mine!”
A deeper exploration of OSMRE’s website shows that Coalie appears to be a genuine effort on the agency’s part to explain its goals. And while it may not have been OSMRE’s intention, a poorly designed lump of coal is actually the perfect metaphor to represent the Trump administration’s desperate attempt to revive the coal industry.
The perfect mascot for Trump’s energy agenda
Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has been on a mission to prop up coal, despite both environmental and economic data pointing to a dwindling future for fossil fuels.
Coal’s dominance has been declining for years, and for good reason: Burning coal is linked to air pollution that can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, and more. It’s one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas pollution, with environmental experts estimating that the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Further, multiple studies have found that coal is among the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it significantly less competitive than renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and natural gas.
Nevertheless, last April Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, at the same time that his administration suspended a decades-old program to detect lung disease in coal miners. In September, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend more than half a billion dollars to prop up coal.
Now enter Coalie: the mascot tasked with the gargantuan challenge of making Trump’s coal bailout seem palatable. In a new post to OSMRE’s website titled “10 Things to Know About How OSMRE Supports America’s Energy Legacy and Communities,” Coalie is pictured smiling and waving in multiple hastily assembled graphics.
He’s serving as the cheerful mouthpiece for several dubious claims, including that OSMRE works with Indigenous peoples by “consulting with tribal leadership through a government-to-government process” (see the federal government’s long-standing history of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition), and that OSMRE “evaluates the potential environmental impact of federal actions” and practices “responsible stewardship of public lands and resources” (there is no environmentally responsible way to harvest coal).
In short, Coalie has been handed an impossible job. Ironically, if any mascot could succinctly sum up the Trump administration’s asinine insistence on a fossil fuel comeback, it would be a shoddily slapped together illustration of a lump of coal.