Trade: Trump can punish countries, but jobs are unlikely to return.

Still, even if Mr. Trump were to win in November and roll back some environmental regulations, it wouldn’t significantly alter the fate of Mingo County and much of the nation’s depressed coal industry.

“Taking a more lenient stance on clean-air or clean-water rules would do nothing to help coal demand,” Mr. Book said. “Coal-fired power plants have been mothballed and are being disassembled, and that capacity is gone. It’s not even close to something you could reverse by administrative fiat.”

If Washington’s ability to gridlock even the most ambitious of presidential agendas were to block Mr. Trump’s White House plans, he would still have the bully pulpit, of course. And unlike Theodore Roosevelt, who coined that term, Mr. Trump probably wouldn’t speak softly.

Still, that might not be enough to keep Oreos baking in Chicago. Nabisco’s bakery there isn’t shuttering completely as Mr. Trump has suggested, but some Oreo production will begin shifting to Salinas, Mexico — where Mondelez, Nabisco’s corporate parent, has invested $130 million to build new lines. Oreos will also continue to be produced at Nabisco bakeries in Virginia, New Jersey and Oregon.

Announced in July 2015, the Nabisco layoffs in Chicago continued during the Illinois primary in March, despite jabs from Mr. Trump and both Democratic presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders.

United Technologies is similarly unlikely to rethink Carrier’s move out of Indianapolis. And in an era when Apple is willing to fight the Obama administration’s efforts to unlock an iPhone on national security grounds, more corporate defiance may become the norm.

Blanketing countries from China to Mexico with import duties would be a tall order without congressional approval. The White House, though, does retain plenty of leeway to punish countries it thinks are engaged in currency manipulation, dumping of products below the cost of production and other free-trade abuses.