Trump gives middle finger to heckler during Ford factory tour in Michigan as video goes viral

President Trump appeared to give the middle finger to an autoworker during his tour of a Ford plant in Michigan on Tuesday, according to a video obtained by TMZ.

Mr. Trump was touring Ford’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, when a worker reportedly yelled “pedophile protector” at the president. The worker began shouting at the president.

In the video posted online by TMZ, Mr. Trump yells back, “f—- you!” and then points at the worker with his middle finger before switching and flipping the worker off.

“A lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the President gave an appropriate and unambiguous response,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said in a statement to The Washington Times.

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin seized on the video and used it to characterize the president.

“Protecting pedophiles and saying [f***] you to American workers,” Mr. Martin wrote.

The worker’s accusation was presumably a reference to files related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and the public at large have expressed frustration over the Justice Department’s slow release of the files.

Since Dec. 19, one month after the Epstein Files Transparency Act went into effect, Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has put out 12,285 documents, compromising 125,575 pages of investigative materials. That amounts to roughly 1% of the documents in the Justice Department’s possession.

Earlier Tuesday, a group of bipartisan lawmakers asked a federal judge in Manhattan to force the Justice Department to promptly release all of the investigative materials.

Mr. Trump has accused Democrats of using the Epstein files as a weapon to distract from his administration’s accomplishments. The president, who was friends with Epstein until they had a falling out in the early 2000s, has been mentioned in some of the files, but there has been no evidence that he was involved in any wrongdoing.