Nebraska has been on a roll. After voting big for President Donald Trump in 2024 and Republicans since forever, the state is now reaping what it so eagerly sowed.
Its economy is collapsing. It lacks the workers it needs. It is losing its medical facilities. And none of this is surprising given how dependent Nebraska is on federal subsidies, immigrant farm labor, and international trade—all things Trump and his party have targeted with budget slashing, mass immigration raids, and tariffs.
The latest blow is the announcement that Tyson Foods is closing its beef processing plant in Lexington. The facility employs around 3,200 workers—roughly a third of the town’s population.
President Donald Trump, shown in 2024.
A hit of that scale doesn’t land on Lexington alone, though. It sends shockwaves through the region: restaurants, grocery stores, landlords, schools, trucking operations, small suppliers, and everyone else tied to the local economy. With the closure slated for January, the message for the holidays and the year ahead is grim. Entire communities now have to brace for an economic crater their political choices helped create.
Trump has spent years attacking the inputs that keep Nebraska’s agriculture-heavy economy afloat. The state depends on immigrant labor to run its farms and packing plants, yet Trump’s raids have scared those workers away or deported them. It depends on access to global markets, yet Trump keeps slapping tariffs on everyone in sight, inspiring them to retaliate with tariffs of their own—driving up the cost of doing business.
And for all the talk about putting America first, Trump was perfectly happy to boost Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, by cutting a deal to import Argentinian beef straight into the U.S. market. Trump got to help a fellow authoritarian, and Nebraska got undercut.
Tyson’s cuts aren’t limited to Nebraska. The company is also slashing another 1,700 jobs at its plant in Amarillo, Texas. In total, those cuts will slash the nation’s beef processing capacity by up to 9%. And when capacity drops that sharply across the country, the downstream effects show up exactly where you’d expect: higher prices at the checkout counter and fewer jobs in the places that can least afford to lose them.
There’s yet another layer to this crisis, one that Republicans pretend doesn’t exist.
Years of intensifying drought have helped to shrink cattle herds across the Great Plains. Climate change makes every part of the system more brittle—feed costs rise, grazing conditions worsen, ranchers liquidate herds, and the supply chain tightens even further. Instead of facing that reality, though, Republicans have spent decades mocking climate science and blocking any serious attempt to prepare for the future. That denial is now baked into the economic suffering states like Nebraska are experiencing.
None of these problems are abstract. They are the predictable result of a political movement that promises easy answers, scapegoats immigrants, attacks the very federal investment its states rely on, and refuses to accept the basic facts of a warming planet.
As long as Nebraskans keep voting Republican to, you know, keep some trans kid from a swim meet or whatever, this won’t be the last town in the state to face economic collapse.
