Original air date: October 12th 2025
President Trump’s tariff threats have resulted in an incredible surge in manufacturing here in the US. One you may not have heard much about. Scott Thuman reports on one expanding industry that might surprise you.
The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.
Take a peek behind this sugarcane field, and you’ll find an economic boost taking place in New Iberia Parish, Louisiana.
First Solar, an American company, busily finishing a build-out of its newest solar panel plant. All 2.4 million square feet of it.
Louisianan Georges Antoun is First Solar’s chief commercial officer.
Scott: How’s business these days?
Georges Antoun: Business is very good. As a matter of fact, we talk about we have a pipeline and a backlog over the next two, three years that is very strong.
That answer might be surprising, given President Trump’s preference for coal and gas over wind and solar.
But executives here know they are fulfilling a key part of the administration’s economic plan — expanding US manufacturing.
Scott: Truly an American-made product?
Antoun: Yeah, a hundred percent American-made product. This is American innovation, American technology, American manufacturing, American labor, American supply chain
Expanding American manufacturing is a promise all presidents make, but few deliver. 1979 was the high point, with 19.4 million manufacturing jobs. Today, that number is down to 12.7 million.
4.5 million jobs were lost under George W.Bush; 300,000 more factory jobs disappeared under President Obama.
During Trump’s first term, there were initial gains, but then Covid hit, and America lost another 200,000 positions.
Post-Covid, Biden saw a boost with 800,000 factory jobs added. Now back in office, President Trump wants his legacy to include what he calls an “explosion” in American manufacturing.
President Trump: I want to be around in a year from now or two years from now because we’re going to see an explosion like this country has never seen before.
The administration keeping a running tally of the companies that have promised to invest in the US.
Including $600 billion from Apple, $500 billion from Nvidia, and a combined $55 billion from vehicle and equipment makers.
Trump credits his controversial tariff policy for the changes, but will it lead to an industrial renaissance?
Scott: What do you see as the future of manufacturing here in this country?
Antoun: We had a culture of manufacturing, and we lost that for a long time. We lost that for many reasons; we needed to bring back manufacturing to the US.
While the big companies and their massive factories help generate headlines, more than 90 percent of US manufacturers employ fewer than 100 people.
Down the road, Noble Plastics, a small business that’s already signed up to help supply the solar panel factory.
Missy Rogers is the company president.
Missy Rogers: It’s been a wonderful opportunity to see a company like that come into our community that is walking the talk. In the past, you might hear of a large company looking at Louisiana for a manufacturing location, but they wanted to bring all of their vendors from another part of the country or from other countries.
Rogers wants younger Americans to get excited about working in modern factories.
Rogers: If they had a family member or an uncle, an aunt, a grandparent who was in a factory, it’s completely different. You walk our floor, and it’s clean, it’s safe, it’s automated, and the skillset is still the same. You still need to be creative. You still need to care. You still need to have a good head for spatial skills and numbers because quality matters.
Rogers thinks US businesses don’t need to follow China’s lead.
Scott: We’ve definitely heard that people love to say that the future is overseas, that the heyday is gone for American manufacturing, that it’s Vietnam, that it’s Korea, it’s somewhere else.
Rogers: I’d actually argue the exact opposite. I think that mass customization is what people want now, and you see that happening here with the technologies like 3D printing, where you don’t have to wait until you can make 10 million identical things, and everybody just has to live with it. What was it? Ford said, I’ll offer anybody whatever color they want on my cars as long as it’s black. We’re so far beyond that, and the kind of responsiveness and interactivity that people want to customize things to have it when they want it, where they want it, how they want it, that can’t be adequately supplied from overseas. It’s going to actually strengthen domestic manufacturing.
Whether we’re at the beginning of a new manufacturing boom won’t be clear for years, but with each factory job supporting four other jobs in the local community, there’s a feeling here that things are looking up.
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Sharyl: People seem to think there’s a big benefit, national security-wise, in getting solar panels here instead of so many from China.
Scott: Well, there is. In fact, earlier this year, security experts reportedly found so-called “kill switches” inside some Chinese-made solar components and that would allow China or another hostile group to destabilize or do something else that would cripple the current system that we use. Now, the change that they’re looking for is to shore up these vulnerabilities to make sure that when you look at key industries, like power distribution, like communications, that we aren’t susceptible to all these Chinese-made bits of equipment.
Watch video here.
