Eddie Mounts, the son and grandson of miners, describes the past few years in coal country as a time of economic plague. Businesses closed and people scattered, he said. They went to Tennessee, North Carolina, anywhere work could be found. If they had to learn a new trade, they did that, too.

The source of the affliction, he insisted, could be traced to Washington, to the Obama administration and to regulations that Mr. Mounts, 54, said were intentionally designed to shut down the mines: “Shut them down and get them not working.”

So he was thrilled with the news on Tuesday that President Trump was signing an executive order aiming to roll back some of those regulations. “It may take a couple of years to catch fire again,” Mr. Mounts said. “But I think it will.”

It is hard to overstate the antipathy in coal country to the Obama administration’s regulatory approach, beyond even the rules that Mr. Trump has moved to undo. It included the Clean Power Plan, which would shutter older coal-fired power plants, and which the Trump administration is planning to rewrite, but also the assertiveness of federal health and safety regulation. Some saw these as mere attempts to bully the mines.