President Donald Trump’s visit to a Ford manufacturing facility in Michigan followed the familiar structure of a presidential stop tied to American industry.
The appearance emphasized manufacturing, jobs, and domestic production, with the setting and schedule offering little deviation from past visits of its kind. While some of the site’s employees welcomed the MAGA figurehead, at least one of the workers took the opportunity to call him out.
Trump was in Dearborn on Jan. 13, touring Ford’s F-150 assembly plant, where a now-viral clip appears to show him shouting and raising his middle finger toward a worker who taunted him with an insult about his past. The employee was later identified as 40-year-old TJ Sabula and was subsequently suspended.
The White House issued a statement on Trump flipping the bird in public, telling TMZ, “A lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the president gave an appropriate and unambiguous response.”
While White House Communications Director Steven Cheung defended his boss’s actions, social media users zeroed in on one of Trump’s body features in the video from Dearborn. The size of his raised finger became a major talking point online, with some trolls editing the image to mock the sitting commander in chief.
“Trump literally flipped the smallest bird I’ve ever seen lmao,” one person humorously wrote on Threads. A second reply read, “I’ve seen hummingbirds bigger than the bird he flew.”
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The jokes resumed when a third person on the platform added, “You know what they say about tiny hands.” Someone else posted, “Those baby hands can only extend so far.”
“Look at that little bitty finger and hand, like a two-year-old flipping someone off,” expressed another Threads user. One responder stated, “I couldn’t even see the finger.”
Additionally, a poster sarcastically wondered, “Did he flip him off or give him a thumbs up? Man, I miss when presidents had normal-sized hands.”
Since his rise to mainstream celebrity status in the 1980s, there have been tales of Trump being particularly thin-skinned about the size of his hands. “Spy” magazine originally ridiculed the real estate mogul as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in the culture and news publication that ran from 1986 to 1998.
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By the time Trump launched his presidential bid in February 2016, his physical appearance had already become political fodder. During the Republican primary, then-Sen. Marco Rubio turned Trump’s hands into a national punchline while mocking him at a Virginia campaign event.
“He’s like 6’2,” which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2.” Have you seen his hands?” Rubio asked the Roanoke crowd, per CBS News. “You know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust them. You can’t trust them.”
Rubio’s implication that Trump also has other bite-sized body parts led to a memorable moment at a 2016 Fox News debate, where the frontrunner guaranteed to the entire world that there is “no problem” with the anatomy below his waist.
However, by May 2016, Rubio was changing his tune after Trump essentially secured the party’s nomination for that year’s general election. The now-54-year-old Florida native quickly bent the knee to the new GOP standardbearer.
“I actually told Donald — one of the debates, I forget which one — I apologized to him for that,” Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “I said, ‘You know, I’m sorry that I said that. It’s not who I am, and I shouldn’t have done it.’ And I didn’t say it in front of the cameras, I didn’t want any political benefit.”
Rubio went on to serve as Secretary of State in the second Trump administration, which began in January 2025, alongside Vice President JD Vance. In addition to hand size, Trump also seems to have an obsession with shoe size, according to his second in command.
Apparently, Trump derailed an “important” Oval Office meeting to question Rubio and the VP about their footwear. Vance, 41, later recalled, “The president kind of leans back in his chair and says, ‘You know, you can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size.’”
