Now I’m not familiar with who these coal miners are and all I could find is speculation on what Trump vs Obama could be like for coal miners, so excuse my ignorance on the subject, but I’m going to use this to illustrate a larger problem I have with the left currently.
So, for the coal miners, shouldn’t they have the evidence to back it up? If they’re the ones making the claim, the burden of proof should fall on them to show that there’s a problem. What policies exactly made them better under Obama rather than Trump? If it’s not policies, what exactly did Trump do to cause change elsewhere? Is it a coincidence? Is it because of the decline of the coal industry getting worse over time and has nothing to do with the president? Are their experiences reflective of all coal miners? I don’t know. Now, I’m not saying there’s not a problem and I’m not saying that the coal miners are lying or that Trump is innocent. Rather, believing without any evidence is my problem. Now, apologies if I misinterpreted your post, but the wording “choose to believe” is making me think you take them on face value without any evidence. Either way, this is something I see some people on the left do and I quite disagree with it. Politics based on emotions is not how things should be done. There are many reasons why someone could lie about their experiences, their experiences could be an isolated case and not reflective of the whole, etc. I don’t see the need to solve a problem when there’s no evidence for it, and if that happens, it usually backfires (as an example, hiring women firefighters and the like that aren’t physically qualified in order to combat sexism, I believe, and just ends up with less qualified people being in charge of saving people’s lives).
Now, I’ve been left-leaning for a long time, and I still consider myself left in the political spectrum, despite getting closer and closer to the center as time passes, and I don’t mean this as an attack. I do think identity politics and politics based on emotional appeals rather than facts end up with bad policies and our terrible political climate currently. To be clear, I think these things are wrong on both sides, but the left has a bigger problem with these recently.