US Manufacturing is Back Under President Trump

America is in the midst of a Manufacturing Renaissance.

After years of contraction and stagnation, U.S. manufacturing is expanding again, with solid activity metrics and a wave of reshoring announcements, according to the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing.  

“Thanks to President Trump’s tariffs and trade deals, communities across the nation are benefiting from the renaissance, with more than 500 new investments totaling more than $380 billion in manufacturing plants, over 160,000 direct new manufacturing jobs announced, and more than 300,000 new direct and indirect jobs.”

Following NAFTA, America was losing manufacturing and replacing it with service industries.

US manufacturing employment peaked at about 19.5 million in 1979. By the early-to-mid 1990s (around NAFTA’s start), it was roughly 16.8–17.2 million. It rose modestly through the late 1990s to around 17.5–17.6 million before declining sharply after 2000, bottoming near 11.5 million around 2009–2010.

It has since recovered somewhat to roughly 12.6–12.8 million in recent years. This means the US has roughly 4.3–4.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs today than in 1994. The steepest losses occurred in the 2000–2010 period, losses building after NAFTA.

Manufacturing’s share of total employment has fallen dramatically over decades—from around 30% in the early 1950s to roughly 8–10% today—as part of a long-term structural shift.

Now the Trump Administration is securing trade deals with countries around the world and issuing tailored tariffs for critical industry after critical industry, including the semiconductor chipmaking.

“Semiconductors underpin everything from smartphones and superintelligence to fighter jets and precision missiles, and the country that makes them holds an economic and national security advantage. In the past, America let that advantage slip. The United States held 37 percent of the world’s chipmaking capacity in 1990 and only 12 percent by 2020.14 Employment in semiconductor and electronic component manufacturing peaked at 714,900 in January 2001 and fell by nearly half, to 364,900, by December 2020,” the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing reports. 

“In January 2026, after a Commerce Department Section 232 investigation, President Trump placed a 25-percent tariff on a class of advanced logic chips and signaled that broader tariffs—with an offset for companies that build in the United States—could follow.”

Currently:

Production jumped to 59.0, the strongest reading since November 2021.

Federal Reserve industrial production data has also shown gains in manufacturing output, with particular strength in durables and semiconductors/electronics tied to AI and related investment. Manufacturing accounts for roughly 9.4–9.7%of GDP, according to the Federal Reserve.

The Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing PMI rose to 55.5 in October 2026 (from 54.5 in September), marking the 10th consecutive month of expansion. Readings above 50 indicate growth.

The White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing offers some important background:

In 2001, China was admitted into the World Trade Organization (WTO). But instead of honoring its WTO accession commitments, Beijing entrenched a non-market system marked by forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, subsidies and industrial policies that create systemic overcapacity and overproduction, deeply embedded market-access barriers, lack of regulatory transparency, and refusal to provide reciprocal treatment to U.S. exports. What ensued was what American workers warned would happen: sky-high import volumes, lost jobs, plant closures, collapsed supply chains, shrunken tax bases, declining labor-force participation, and deaths of despair.

Though 2001 was a watershed moment, deindustrialization had started decades before. Cynical politicians and the corporations that fund their campaigns had long tried to remove the protections that turned the United States from a dependent colony into the world’s greatest industrial power. American manufacturers could not beat unfair foreign competition and either offshored or closed up shop.

And:

On the tax cuts front, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act lets a company expense 100 percent of the cost of building a factory on American soil instead of depreciating it over decades. That means the full building cost is written off the year the concrete is poured. For a chief financial officer deciding where in the world to put their next plant, that one provision alone changes the math.

President Trump has made it clear: all companies have to do to avoid tariffs is build here, invest here, and hire here in the United States. That is exactly what is happening. You can see it in the macro and micro data. And with construction cranes reaching toward the sky, you can see it from highways all across the country.

Read the entire White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing report. It’s fascinating and will offset the media propaganda.