President flips off a line worker at the Ford plant on national TV.

Buddy. Buddy. Listen to me on this one. The man went on a factory tour. The factory was the Ford F-150 plant in Dearborn. The factory makes the most popular truck in America. The man, who is the President of the United States, was up on an elevated walkway, the way the bosses always were when I worked the floor at the Trop, looking down on the workers, the way bosses always do. That is the staging on a factory tour.

A worker on the line, a man named TJ Sabula, forty years old, UAW Local 600, looked up at the elevated walkway and yelled what sounded like pedophile protector at the President. Once. Cellphone video confirms it. The President, on tape, twice mouthed fuck you at the line worker and twice raised his middle finger at the line worker.

The President of the United States.

The press wrote it down. The cellphone video was in everybody’s feed by lunch. The communications director at the White House issued a statement calling the President’s response “appropriate and unambiguous.” Appropriate. The word means fitting the situation. The situation, fellas, was a man standing on an elevated walkway giving the middle finger to a line worker on national television.

I have run a casino floor. I have had drunks yell things at me. I have yelled things back at drunks. I have not, in any of those cases, been the President of the United States. I have not been on the elevated walkway with a press pool watching. I have not had the thirty-eight wire services in the room writing my facial expressions down. Different job.

Then. Then. The plant suspended Sabula. Took him off the line, walked him out, the suspension was on paper. The UAW Local 600 said no, you don’t. Within forty-eight hours, the UAW announced the worker was kept on, no discipline, full job, the whole nine. That is what a union does.

Here’s the thing the staging is supposed to make you forget. Sabula was on the line. He was building a truck when the President came in to take credit for the truck. He was at work, doing his work, and the man at the top of the walkway was the one not at work that day, taking the picture, holding the airplane to fly home in. And the line worker is the one who got suspended.

That part is the trick. The picture says the boss is the boss and the worker is the worker. The trick says, when the worker speaks, the worker takes the discipline. The union said no. The union is what’s left in the room that says no.

I’m arguing with the television. The television’s got a middle finger on it. The middle finger is on a federal walkway at a Ford plant.