Ford Motor Company has declined to dismiss a factory worker who heckled President Donald Trump during a visit to one of the automaker’s plants last month, according to union officials, allowing the employee to return to work without disciplinary marks on his record.
The worker, Thomas “TJ” Sabula, 40, was temporarily suspended after calling the president a “pedophile protector” during Trump’s appearance at a Ford facility in Dearborn, Michigan. Laura Dickerson, a vice president of the United Auto Workers, said Sabula has since returned to his job and that the incident has not resulted in a negative entry in his personnel file.
Video footage from the visit showed Trump, 79, responding to the heckle by making an obscene gesture toward Sabula and saying, “F–k you.” Dickerson said the president also told the worker, “You’re fired,” during the exchange.
Speaking to a crowd in Washington on Monday, Dickerson said that outcome was never a possibility. “This ain’t The Apprentice,” she said, according to Reuters, referring to Trump’s former television programme.
Dickerson also described the confrontation during Trump’s tour of a plant producing the Ford F-150 pickup truck. “There was a worker at that plant that day who famously told Trump exactly what he thought of him,” she said. “Unfortunately, in that moment, we saw what the current president really thinks about working people and the way he responded — he gave us the middle finger.”
Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman and the great-grandson of its founder, Henry Ford, said the incident was unfortunate and that he was embarrassed by it.
A crowdfunding campaign launched in support of Sabula raised more than $800,000 before being suspended. Donors praised him for confronting the president over what they described as his administration’s handling of the so-called Epstein files.
The worker’s reinstatement has drawn criticism from some Republicans. Representative Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, said after the incident that Sabula had a legal right to speak but suggested the consequences would have been different in his home state.
“I guess he has a First Amendment right, but in Tennessee, we have a right to fire his a–,” Burchett told MeidasTouch.
