Trump Promised a Golden Age. Then a Montana Lumber Plant Closed Down.

The workers in the old lumber town of Bonner, Mont., expected bad news late last month when they were told to shut down their machines one morning and meet on the factory floor.

Their plant, which made high-end trim and siding for homes, was a vestige of the wood industry that once dominated western Montana. President Trump promised a “golden age” for American industry, when the sawmills and copper mining industries that built Montana would roar back. But nothing felt golden that morning. The 104 workers at the UFP Edge factory were told that their plant was shutting down. They would all be laid off.

“They gave up on us,” said Troy Fisher, who spent 40 years working for different mills and lumber companies in Bonner-West Riverside, an unincorporated community of 1,400 tucked beside the Clark Fork River, not far from the college town of Missoula.

The arguments over the demise of the UFP Edge plant have a familiar ring to them, dating back decades, through Democratic and Republican presidencies alike. The powers that be in Montana, now all Republican, say that jobs are plentiful in a state where the unemployment rate is just 2.8 percent, compared with 4.2 percent nationally. The siding plant’s closure was unfortunate, but the workers will be fine, they say.

The workers aren’t so sure. They say that many available jobs pay less, as their cost of living — especially their housing — soars. Several Bonner workers said they had applied for jobs that pay $5 an hour less than the $20 to $25 they earned at the siding plant, without similar benefits. The elites are doing great in a Montana buoyed by technology and tourism, they say, but blue collar workers are slipping farther behind.

“As far as the lumber industry, I don’t see much opportunity for any of us,” said Mike Brush, 40, whose layoff derailed his plans to buy land and build an off-grid cabin.

But this being 2025, few in Bonner could agree on who deserved the blame.

“These are the exact jobs that Trump swore to protect,” said River Shannon Aloia, 47, who left a career as a pastry chef in Missoula and found better-paying work at the plant as a team lead and forklift driver.

Ms. Aloia, who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, blamed the uncertainty of Mr. Trump’s tariffs and trade policies, saying, “You found ways to make us less profitable, increase our costs, and you wonder why we’re shutting down.”

Conservative workers were just as adamant in their defense of Mr. Trump and his efforts to shore up timber jobs by increasing logging on national forests. The shutdown, they said, mostly reflected the harsh reality of an industry that has shuttered more than three dozen timber mills since the 1990s. Montana lost still more logging and mining jobs over the past year, though the state can now claim the highest share of bartenders in the country per capita.

For its part, UFP Industries, a Michigan-based building-materials company that bought the Bonner facility five years ago, said that Mr. Trump’s tariffs “played absolutely no role” in the closure.

The company said that transporting materials across storm-prone mountain passes had been a challenge, and that the factory suffered a setback when a major customer took painted siding in-house. The plant never turned a profit, according to Abby Mitch, a spokeswoman for UFP.

“The facility just really struggled financially,” she said. “We wish that it had worked out. We committed for so long. Consolidation was an inevitability.”

Some laid-off workers dismissed that explanation, saying the plant had been on track to break even in the coming years. Several believed that their jobs were being sent to UFP’s plant in Durango, Mexico. Ms. Mitch said that UFP’s work would largely go to plants in Texas and California. Several workers said that they had not received a clear explanation for the shutdown and still did not understand.

“We’ve heard tariffs, we’ve heard order slowdowns,” said Michael Snodgrass, 28, who worked at the plant for three years and was now part of a diminished crew still going in to work to fill the final orders. “I don’t think anybody has given us a real reason.”

As company officials provided details about severance during the July meeting, some workers teared up. Others demanded to know if they would get promised raises. Many simply went home in stunned silence, dreading the job hunt at a moment when many businesses are pumping the brakes on hiring.

The disconnect between the views expressed by politicians on the overall state of the economy and those expressed by workers at ground level is precisely what fueled the rise of Mr. Trump’s brand of conservative populism. Mr. Trump’s target had been Democrats and their perceived allegiance to free trade and coastal elites.

But with the G.O.P. now entrenched in Montana, the elite is the president’s party. Just days before the Bonner closure, Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican and affluent software executive-turned-vocal Trump supporter, was in central Montana celebrating as many as 500 new jobs created by the arrival of a European company that makes vacuum technology for semiconductors.

Sarah Swanson, commissioner of Montana’s Department of Labor and Industry, said in an interview that the state’s manufacturing economy is “stronger than it’s ever been,” and that employers were calling her to ask about hiring the laid-off Bonner employees.

The state’s senators and two House members — all Republicans — have also promised that Mr. Trump’s tax-cutting law will help Montana’s workers.

But some employees at the Bonner plant groused that Mr. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill had not saved their jobs.

“It’s not trickling down,” said Cameron Harris, 23, a forklift driver at the plant who had been saving up for a house. He said he doubted he would find similar work in the lumber industry, and was hoping to get a certification in auto repair.

Ryan Busse, a former gun industry executive and the failed Democratic nominee for governor in 2024, said that the state’s Republican-dominated leaders seemed reluctant to acknowledge any economic concern among consumers and workers. Despite the low unemployment rate, the state has shed manufacturing jobs over the past year, according to government figures. Logging and mining jobs were down 9 percent in June from a year ago.

“It just feels like the economy is treading water,” Mr. Busse said. “The metrics look not bad. The feel does not match. Your housing expenses are going up. Your cost of living is going up. Your income isn’t going up. None of that feels sustainable to me.”

Farmers and ranchers are worried about how Mr. Trump’s trade wars will affect overseas markets for beef and wheat. Even an ardent Trump supporter, Josh Smith, who owns the Montana Knife Company, posted a YouTube video complaining that tariffs were driving up his costs for imported steel and a $400,000 German-made grinding machine.

Montana officials held an emergency event at a Hilton Garden Inn in Missoula last Wednesday to help the Bonner workers apply for unemployment benefits and to connect them with potential new employers.

A few who are still going into the plant took a break from their shifts to attend, their beards streaked with white paint, as they thumbed through unemployment packets and listened to state labor employees reassure them it would be all right.

The workers spoke with recruiters from local businesses, but many who lived in Missoula came away wondering how they would afford to stay in the area.

Home values there have soared from $350,000 before the pandemic to $570,000 now, according to Zillow, as people from California and elsewhere flock to the state for its mountains and trout-fishing rivers. Even before the layoff announcement, some plant workers who could not afford an apartment lived out of their trucks or campers on a colleagues’ properties, they said.

As the event wrapped up, the onetime colleagues bumped fists and headed their separate ways. But Mr. Snodgrass, a father of two, was among a few who had to get back to the plant. Contemplating where he’d go next, he said that his 4-year-old had already started to ask whether he had found another job.