Trump's trade squeeze breaks the quiet trust in Nebraska

By Ruth Behrens · Reporting from Newell, Iowa · October 12, 2026

When Donald Trump undercut ranchers with foreign beef and costly tariffs, he treated rural loyalty as a bottomless well and broke the quiet trust of the people who feed this country.

The fence line and the basis chart

Down here where the black dirt meets the county road, a man learns early that you do not argue with a basis chart or a late frost. You just figure out what needs doing. You hitch up the tractor, and you get to work before the sun clears the timber. But a man expects the rules of the game to stay somewhat steady while he is out there breaking his back in the heat. Over in Nebraska, Yvette Mannon runs a herd of cattle on ground she bought. In April, a wildfire tore through her land and destroyed fence and grazing acres. When she went to put the wire back up, she found steel prices sitting at their highest levels in years because of tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump. That left her to spend over $300,000 to replace the fencing. That is not just a ledger entry on a balance sheet. That is the college fund and the retirement cushion turned into rusted wire by policies written thousands of miles away, by people who have never had to mend a single strand in January.

The trouble did not stop at the hardware bill, because the machinery and the trucks still need fuel to move the harvest. As reported by the BBC and the Qatar Tribune, diesel prices rose more than 40% from the previous year, driven hard by the war in Iran. Up near Lexington, Nebraska, Jake Wolfinger runs a feedlot where some of his equipment drinks diesel tanks every single day. Duane Kimball, a farmer near Callaway, looks at the daily upcharge. He watches his neighbors go back to their banks just to increase their lines of credit. It is the exact same mechanism of distress we watched play out during the US-China trade war, when government-imposed tariffs intended to protect national interests triggered retaliatory trade barriers. Now as then, the policy is all thunder and no rain for the people who actually produce the food.

A betrayal at the auction barn

The worst part of it was not even the cost of the steel or the price at the pump. It was the timing of the knife in the back. Just before the crucial September-to-November window when ranchers wean and sell their calves, the Trump administration announced the import of duty-free foreign beef to lower consumer prices. The administration also opened the southern border to Mexican cattle. Yvette Mannon put it plain to the BBC when she said, "So we're 'Buy American', 'Let's Make America Great', but for you guys over here, sorry." It just felt like a betrayal. James Mitchell, an agricultural economist at the University of Arkansas, notes that all of this hit cattle markets negatively. Jake Wolfinger saw his cattle prices drop from $240 per hundredweight to $225. Down in Ohio, soybean farmer David Schacht watched fertilizer double in price while his earnings were left entirely outpaced. Farm bankruptcies increased according to the Qatar Tribune. In Jackson County, Minnesota, as the Star Tribune reported, veterans like Mike Buresch and Daron Buresch are left wondering how long a man can keep taking it on the chin before his operation goes under.

There are those who will tell you that a conservative voter will always pull the lever for the party of the right no matter how deep the red ink gets on the ledger. Richard Koch, a retired factory worker and former chair of the Jackson County GOP, insists that people around there still look at conservative versus the other side and find the other side wanting. Veteran farmers like Don Cantrell will tell you they love seeing the Department of Government Efficiency cut waste because there is too much of it. But you talk to Don Batie over his farm numbers and you hear a different story entirely. Don Batie, a retired corn and soybean farmer who owned his farm, watched corn prices fall to $4.29 a bushel. He had to abandon his plan to pass his farm to his daughter because tariffs and inflation made the math impossible. When men who bled for the party start working on their own numbers and realize it is all gone, the party loyalty tends to curdle into something very quiet and very cold.

The quiet ballot in the pickup

The politicians in Washington think they can slap a bandage on a severed limb and call it healing. When the pressure got too hot ahead of the midterm elections, Donald Trump signed an executive order deferring the federal excise tax on diesel used on public roads, a savings worth 24 cents a gallon. He even floated wild plans to import diesel from Russia, with Vladimir Putin agreeing to release supplies immediately to the American and global marketplace. A group of senators led by Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski warned that the deal violated US laws banning Russian energy imports and provided Putin with a financial lifeline while his troops kill Ukrainians. Importing Russian fuel to bail out the domestic mess created by an unnecessary war in Iran is not a farm policy. It is a desperate scramble to keep the lights on before the voters walk into the school gym in November.

The defenders of the administration argue that these bold strokes are necessary to break up globalist supply chains and confront foreign trade abuses. True conservatives must weather the storm to secure long-term independence. But that argument rings hollow to a rancher who has to write a check for fence wire today while the White House opens the gates to foreign beef. The historical record of the 1980s Farm Crisis tells us precisely what happens when debt loads mount and margins disappear. The ground changes hands, the small towns dry up, and the church pews empty out as families pack up for the county seat or the city. The tragedy of this moment is not that rural America has suddenly turned its back on its values. Its loyalty has been treated as a bottomless well by leaders who mistake eternal optimism for infinite endurance. When the ballots are counted this November, the real casualty will not be a single candidate or a single county commission race. The real casualty will be the quiet trust between the man on the tractor and the government that swore it had his back.

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WTI crude oil price. Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED).

Trump's trade squeeze breaks the quiet trust in Nebraska

The fence line and the basis chart

A betrayal at the auction barn

The quiet ballot in the pickup

Sources