Donald Trump gave someone the middle finger on Tuesday, reportedly responding to shouts admonishing him as a “pedophile protector” as he toured a Michigan Ford plant. The celebrity news and gossip site TMZ shared a short video featuring the president’s flustered response to someone heckling off-screen, during which he appears to issue the hand gesture.
Trump spent Tuesday afternoon touring Ford’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, before giving a speech at the Detroit Economic Club.
White House communications director Steven Cheung didn’t confirm whether Trump flashed his middle finger, but said in a statement issued to the Guardian that he gave an “appropriate and unambiguous response” when “a lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage”.
In the roughly 15-second clip, a person can be heard yelling from the floor of the Ford plant while Trump looks down from a railing. TMZ claims Trump yelled obscenities before giving the finger.
A spokesperson for Ford told TMZ they were generally proud of how their employees represented the company and that it was a “great event”. But, they added, they don’t condone “anyone saying anything inappropriate” in their facilities. “When that happens, we have a process to deal with it but we don’t get into specific personnel matters,” they said.
The yelling, and the president’s reaction to it, comes as the Trump administration faces increasing pressure to release the so-called Epstein files, documents expected to expose the dealings of the disgraced financier and sex trafficker in greater detail.
The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the files, according to court filings in the first week of January, even after a federal law required they be released in full in mid-December. Last week, two US representatives, California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, pushed a US district judge to release the files in-full.
The US attorney general Pam Bondi, who is overseeing the process, claims its been slowed to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims. The documents that have been shared are heavily redacted and reveal little, inciting sharp questions from top Democrats about what’s not being disclosed.
Trump, who had been photographed with Epstein and had a long association with him, initially resisted the release of the files. The president has also tried to dismiss the files as a “hoax”.
