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Trump Participates in a Local Factory Tour in Rome, Georgia, Feb. 19, 2026

February 19, 2026 · The White House · 0:03:31

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump participated in a local factory tour in Rome, Georgia on February 19, 2026, walking the floor of a plant that welds steel racks for tire distribution centers — material rolled and cut to length out of Chattanooga, in orders the host put at about 150 truckloads and 30,000 racks, taking two shifts and four to six months to fill.

The host’s account, as he gave it on the tour: the rack business “totally went away around 2015” when costs became unbearable against Chinese producers making racks at $90 apiece against his $150 cost alone; after the tariffs, “you leveled it. The playing field’s back… It’s been a game changer.” The plant had been down to one shift, three days a week, laying off workers and “begging for work”; its lead time on an order now runs 36 weeks and it is turning work down. The President summed the stop up as his tariff case in one building: “Here’s a man virtually going out of business and now he’s got a thriving business hiring people… and it’s all because of tariffs” — the same argument, with the same drug-plant example (a company building 11 U.S. plants, “one reason, tariffs”), that he carried into the day’s Coosa Steel speech and the next day’s Supreme Court tariff fight.

Why it matters

This is the ground-level evidence stop for the Rome trip — the administration presenting a single revived factory as the tariff policy’s proof, hours before the Supreme Court ruled on the authority behind it. It is recorded on the Economy, Tariffs & Trade hub.

Scoreboard watch

The figures as stated on the tour — the $90-versus-$150 cost comparison and the 36-week order lead time — are recorded here as candidate context for the weekly scoreboard. The scoreboard entry itself remains review-gated.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in a Local Factory Tour,” The White House, February 19, 2026 (official upload, embedded above; Rome, GA, per the official description). All figures and characterizations as stated by the President and the factory host on the tour.