Nearly 10 years ago, before he first got elected, I shared a cartoon that captured my concern about Trump being a big-government Republican.

Sort of like Nixon.

I was right to be concerned. Not only was he a big spender in his first term (increasing domestic spending faster than Obama!), but he conducted his version of industrial policy by giving handouts to the coal industry.

Well, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”

Once again, Trump is giving taxpayer money to his cronies in the energy industry.

Here are some excerpts from a Washington Post report from three days ago.

The Trump administration plans to plow more than $800 million into a nationwide revival of coal power as the highly polluting fuel struggles to stand on its own in the marketplace. President Donald Trump said at a White House event Thursday that the money will go toward opening new coal-fired power plants in Alaska and West Virginia as well as propping up more than a dozen struggling plants across 11states including Maryland and Arizona. …Energy experts quickly attacked the subsidies as irrational at a time burning coal is one of the least economic methods of producing power, driving many of the plants in the United States toward retirement. …The Trump administration has already issued several emergency orders that are keeping open a half dozen coal plants that were scheduled for retirement, costing ratepayers tens of millions of dollars.

Yesterday, the Post editorialized about the proposed boondoggle.

President Donald Trump announced this week that…his administration is planning to use more than $800 million of government funds to boost the coal industry. …But why would such a great energy source need government help at all? …Certainly, the market is capable of signaling the need for new energy capacity — and it has done just that in recent years, amid the boom in data centers. Yet despite growing overall demand in recent years, coal power has only waned. In fact, the United States has not opened a large new coal plant since 2013. Perhaps this is because coal plants are competing with cheaper and more efficient energy sources, including natural gas. …In an era of seemingly endless demand, an all-of-the-above approach to energy makes sense. That requires politicians to simply get out of the way, not to not put their thumb of the scale for their preferred energy sources.

By they way, “simply get out of the way” in the energy sector also was good advice for the Obama and Biden Administrations.

Though in their cases, the cronies were green-energy companies instead of coal companies.

And don’t forget that both parties are guilty of participating in the ethanol scam.

I’ll close with two simple observations.

First, industrial policy and cronyism is bad, whether practiced by Republicans or Democrats.

Second, abolishing various subsidies is a good start, but we should get rid of the entire Department of Energy.