TRUMP: "The federal government has made it so hard for natural gas producers, coal producers that they're driving them out of business."

Yeah, except that …

THE FACTS: These are boom times for natural gas extraction, due to a drilling technology that Trump touts often on the campaign trail: hydraulic fracturing, which is better known as fracking.

Natural gas is suffering from nothing except that so many companies plunged into fracking that there’s an oversupply. Storage facilities are completely full across the nation, and there’s a lull in gas drilling brought on directly by the simple fact that we have all the natural gas we need. And then some.

On the coal front, cheap gas is easily out-competing coal. Rather than driving up energy prices, gas is currently cheaper. In fact, in the long term gas is much cheaper in part because you don't have to pile it in in million ton heaps against a chilly day—you just open the tap.

No government program is keeping anyone from drilling another well. No government program is keeping anyone from opening another mine. The market is doing it.

In addition to low gas prices, there’s another factor that’s affecting coal: really, really bad planning.

Many U.S. coal companies also spent big in the past decade, betting on increased demand in Asia. But they have been largely unable to sell as much as they need to overseas to recoup their investments, helping tip several into bankruptcy.

The three biggest US coal companies all made massive investments over the last decade, including paying over market value for Australian coal reserves just as the market for coal exports to China was collapsing.

Coal is being absolutely destroyed by their pals in the oil and gas business, and by their own bad business decisions. Little of that pain is being felt by executives, who are awarding themselves bonus pay even as companies are in bankruptcy.

Peabody Energy Corp., owner of the Twentymile Mine in Routt County, is asking a bankruptcy judge to let it pay up to $12 million in bonuses to the coal-mining company’s top executives.

Instead, it’s being felt by laid-off workers and slashed benefits. And it’s being felt by communities that are taking the hit while executives grab the dollars.

The tiny South Routt School District in northwestern Colorado needed a bailout from the Colorado Department of Education after Peabody missed a tax payment. In July the bankruptcy court allowed Peabody to pay its property tax bills in Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Indiana.

But then, knowing any of that would require Donald Trump to actually read. Or to care about people who are not wealthy. He’s not going to do that. Instead he’s going to let coal executives whine to him that it’s all the government’s fault. And Trump is going to repeat it. Because Trump is simply ignorant.