When Tariffs Come Home: A MAGA Town Reckons With the Cost of Trump’s Trade War

In Lexington, Nebraska, the holiday season arrived this year with less cheer than dread. Instead of Christmas music drifting through downtown storefronts, conversations have turned to layoffs, uncertainty, and a gnawing sense of betrayal. On January 20, roughly 3,200 workers—nearly one in three people in this town of fewer than 11,000—are set to lose their jobs when Tyson Foods closes its beef-processing plant, the community’s economic anchor for decades.

For many residents, the timing feels cruel. For others, it feels inevitable. Lexington sits in Dawson County, a deep-red stretch of Nebraska where T.r.u.m.p carried more than 74 percent of the vote. The county’s political leadership is uniformly Republican, and faith in his promise that tariffs would protect American workers once ran high. Now, that promise is colliding with reality.

People here describe the mood in stark terms: catastrophe, crisis, anxiety, agony. Small business owners report customers breaking down in tears at checkout counters. One shop owner said sales dropped 10 to 20 percent almost immediately after the closure announcement. A local pastor has quietly wondered how to preach about joy to a congregation bracing for economic free fall.

Lexington’s story complicates the caricature of a monolithic MAGA town. Its main street is lined with businesses owned by immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and Somalia—many of them former refugees who found steady work at the Tyson plant, saved diligently, and invested in the community. They are now among those most exposed to the shutdown, even as they had hoped T.r.u.m.p’s economic agenda would finally work in their favor.

Tyson’s decision has been blamed, variously, on corporate maneuvering and market conditions. But reporting by Reuters points to a more direct cause: dwindling cattle supplies. That shortage traces back to the very tariffs and trade policies championed by T.r.u.m.p, which disrupted global markets and helped drive volatility across the beef industry.

During his presidency, T.r.u.m.p repeatedly acknowledged high beef prices while floating ideas like importing beef from Argentina—moves that ranchers and farmers across the Midwest saw as a betrayal. Those announcements rattled futures markets, sending cattle prices tumbling. Ranchers say the impact was devastating. Some estimate billions of dollars in lost value nationwide, wiping out fragile gains just as producers were clawing their way back to profitability after decades of struggle.

“The rug was pulled out from under them,” one industry observer said. The irony was hard to miss: rural farmers, a core constituency for T.r.u.m.p, bore the brunt of policies meant to protect them.

The pain in Lexington is not unique. In North Carolina, the Mackey’s Ferry Sawmill—once the largest private employer in Washington County—shut its doors after more than a century in operation. Its owner, Wilson Jones, traced the final blow to tariffs that triggered retaliation and higher costs. “Those were the last five nails in the coffin,” he said, describing a family business that had survived wars, recessions, and technological change, only to be undone by trade policy.

Economists have long warned that tariffs rarely land cleanly. They provoke retaliation, distort supply chains, and create unintended consequences far from Washington. Even when introduced with the stated goal of reviving domestic manufacturing, they often reward large corporations with the flexibility to downsize, automate, or relocate—while workers and small towns absorb the shock.

In the beef industry, critics argue, consolidation magnifies the harm. A handful of giant meatpacking companies control pricing and contracts with major retailers, leaving independent producers with little leverage. As retail beef prices soar, cattle prices can stagnate or fall—a paradox that frustrates ranchers and confuses consumers.

To many in Lexington, the sense of injustice is compounded by politics. Some residents quietly acknowledge that they voted for the policies now threatening their livelihoods. Others—immigrants, refugees, and Democrats in a Republican stronghold—did not. Yet they will suffer just the same. The line between consequence and collateral damage has blurred.

Supporters of T.r.u.m.p argue that he never intended to shutter plants or bankrupt mills, that his goal was to rebalance trade and bring jobs home. But history suggests that good intentions matter little when policy collides with complex global markets. Tariffs, once imposed, rarely discriminate between friend and foe.

As winter settles over Nebraska, Lexington faces a future defined by hard choices: who stays, who leaves, and whether the town can reinvent itself without its largest employer. The lesson unfolding here is not abstract. It is painfully concrete, written in pink slips and shuttered storefronts—a reminder that political slogans eventually meet economic gravity, and when they do, the fallout spreads fast, timelines fill with anger and disbelief, and the internet, once again, is absolutely exploding.