Updated Feb. 9, 2026, 11:20 a.m. ET
Washington — The Ford Motor Co. employee who heckled President Donald Trump during a January visit to the company’s Dearborn Truck Plant. still has his job and “has no discipline on his record,” a union official confirmed Monday.
“TJ, we got your back,” United Auto Workers Vice President Laura Dickerson said during a Washington, D.C., speech Monday morning. She was referencing TJ Sabula, a 40-year-old UAW Local 600 line worker at the factory who called Trump a “pedophile protector.”
Trump responded by flashing his middle finger and twice mouthing, “F— you,” at Sabula. The president also mouthed a popular catchphrase from his days on reality television: “You’re fired.”
“Well, this ain’t ‘The Apprentice,'” Dickerson said, referencing the NBC program that featured Trump.
The UAW, meeting in Washington this week for its national political conference, has seized on Trump’s confrontation with Sabula as a symbol of how he views the working class. Dickerson highlighted the episode, as did UAW President Shawn Fain.
“In that moment, we saw what the president really thinks about working people,” Dickerson said to a room of roughly 1,000 union representatives. “As UAW members, we speak truth to power. We don’t just protect rights, we exercise them.”
Following the incident, Sabula was suspended from work pending an investigation. The line worker told the Washington Post that he had “no regrets whatsoever,” though he also told the newspaper that he iswasconcerned about the future of his job and believed he would be “targeted for political retribution” for “embarrassing Trump in front of his friends.”
More than $810,000 was later raised through two online fundraisers for Sabula — a GoFundMe titled “TJ Sabula is a patriot!!” and another headlined Support Ford Worker TJ Sabula during suspension — as of Jan. 14, the day after Trump visited the Dearborn plant.
Fain on Monday said he wanted to “shout out brother TJ.”
“That’s a union brother who spoke up,” the UAW leader added. “He put his constitutional rights to work. He put his union rights to work.”
gschwab@detroitnews.com
@GrantSchwab
