How to Tax one type of product only

I have a client who needs to charge state sales tax in every state for one manufacturer only. They dropship from this particular manufacturer and the manufacturer has sent them a letter telling them that if they dropship directly to a customer, they need to charge sales tax.

Does anybody have any experience with this sort of situation?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

If that manufacturer's products are not also supplied by another manufacturer, then you just need to set the products to Taxable in the product editing page.
Setting up tax zones and rates for all 50 states (minus the few that don't have sales tax) will be the real challenge. That sounds like a mountain of work.

The problem with that is all products need to be taxable in-state, and one manufacturer needs to be taxable everywhere, so all of their products are already set to taxable.

Is there a way to create a new product type or something?

You can set the Tax Class for each product, so it may work to define a "universal" class which you would then apply to every state zone.
Most products are "Homestate" class, that manufacturer's products are "US" class.