Good questions. Outside of propaganda, there are indeed good non-economic reasons to want to encourage manufacturing back (e.g. national security interest where you want to retain ability to do something quickly in case you ever need it for wars). agriculture has gone from 95% employment to 5% employment, and didn't disappear. In fact, our agricultural output kept increasing, despite the industry employing less people..
There are ways to be strategically reshoring some manufacturing, again ECON 101, find your areas of comparative advantage and double down on it. For US, it likely looks like niche industries where automation, using less labor, high quality output allows us to put out products that are competitive in a global market. Heck if you look at manufacturing as a percentage of the economy, (both in workers employed, and total output), it has been slowly increasing a bit since lows of early naughts. But we are never going back to the 50s and 60s.
The inevitable future for manufacturing is like agriculture, it never completely disappears, we are able to produce more with less in niche areas, and then use that trade with others for low-value things that are just not worth producing here.
Although maybe his best friend in high school is on the Purdue bench, I doubt it carries much weight today
