Nebraska has been on a roll. After voting large for President Donald Trump in 2024 and Republicans since eternally, the state is now reaping what it so eagerly sowed.
Its economic system is collapsing. It lacks the employees it wants. It’s shedding its medical amenities. And none of that is shocking given how dependent Nebraska is on federal subsidies, immigrant farm labor, and worldwide commerce—all issues Trump and his celebration have focused with price range slashing, mass immigration raids, and tariffs.
The most recent blow is the announcement that Tyson Meals is closing its beef processing plant in Lexington. The power employs round 3,200 employees—roughly a 3rd of the city’s inhabitants.
President Donald Trump, proven in 2024.
A success of that scale doesn’t land on Lexington alone, although. It sends shockwaves by the area: eating places, grocery shops, landlords, faculties, trucking operations, small suppliers, and everybody else tied to the native economic system. With the closure slated for January, the message for the vacations and the 12 months forward is grim. Total communities now need to brace for an financial crater their political selections helped create.
Trump has spent years attacking the inputs that hold Nebraska’s agriculture-heavy economic system afloat. The state relies on immigrant labor to run its farms and packing vegetation, but Trump’s raids have scared these employees away or deported them. It relies on entry to international markets, but Trump retains slapping tariffs on everybody in sight, inspiring them to retaliate with tariffs of their very own—driving up the price of doing enterprise.
And for all of the speak about placing America first, Trump was completely pleased to spice up Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, by slicing a deal to import Argentinian beef straight into the U.S. market. Trump acquired to assist a fellow authoritarian, and Nebraska acquired undercut.
Tyson’s cuts aren’t restricted to Nebraska. The corporate can be slashing one other 1,700 jobs at its plant in Amarillo, Texas. In whole, these cuts will slash the nation’s beef processing capability by as much as 9%. And when capability drops that sharply throughout the nation, the downstream results present up precisely the place you’d count on: increased costs on the checkout counter and fewer jobs within the locations that may least afford to lose them.
There’s yet one more layer to this disaster, one which Republicans faux doesn’t exist.
Years of intensifying drought have helped to shrink cattle herds throughout the Nice Plains. Local weather change makes each a part of the system extra brittle—feed prices rise, grazing circumstances worsen, ranchers liquidate herds, and the availability chain tightens even additional. As a substitute of going through that actuality, although, Republicans have spent a long time mocking local weather science and blocking any severe try to organize for the longer term. That denial is now baked into the financial struggling states like Nebraska are experiencing.
None of those issues are summary. They’re the predictable results of a political motion that guarantees simple solutions, scapegoats immigrants, assaults the very federal funding its states depend on, and refuses to just accept the fundamental info of a warming planet.
So long as Nebraskans hold voting Republican to, you already know, hold some trans child from a swim meet or no matter, this received’t be the final city within the state to face financial collapse.
