Yep, even if 0.1% of those people are experts on a very specific field of manufacturing, that's immediately 86k people.

You can't beat that with any amount of automation.

well, automation itself has a tariffs problem - all the components for automation are mostly foreign made, mostly in China, and even to start - the R&D in automation requires large unimpeded churn of parts and components with quick turnaround, and the tariffs would tremendously impede it and increase cost of it which in R&D means increased risk of failure and a much decreased R&D result for a given budget and timeframe.

And there just plain are jobs you can't automate, some tasks are too delicate or varying for a machine to reliably.

Plus someone has to design that stuff, you have a hiring pool of literal millions of people in China from which to pick the best fit to design your physical widget.