In addition to the hand gesture that made headlines during his visit to a Ford F-150 truck plant in Dearborn last week, President Donald Trump delivered another tough message at the same site.
CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil taped an interview with Trump inside the factory on Jan. 13. After it was over, according to the New York Times, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Dokoupil and his team, “He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full,'” and also, “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”
CBS News said in a statement obtained by the Times that it had always planned to air the entire interview without any edits.
It wasn’t the only communication to generate buzz during Trump’s trip to Detroit. There was also widespread coverage of Trump’s F-bomb phrase and raised middle finger that he delivered after a Ford worker shouted the words “pedophile protector.” The worker, who was later suspended, was referring apparently to Trump’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and the Justice Department’s slow release of the Epstein files, a release required by Congress’ Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Trump’s roughly 13-minute interview with Dokoupil, the new CBS News anchor who debuted in early January, aired on the “CBS Evening News” broadcast done live from General Motors global headquarters at the Hudson’s Detroit building in downtown Detroit.
It was a noticeably lengthy segment for a 30-minute broadcast network newscast. And it contained some testy, seemingly condescending moments, including the president’s claim that Dokoupil wouldn’t have his current job if Trump hadn’t won the 2024 election.
Trump’s contentious attitude toward the media is well-known, as is his appetite for frequently taking questions from the press, often at impromptu sessions inside the Oval Office and onboard Air Force One.
This isn’t Trump’s first litigious brush with CBS News. In 2025, Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit regarding the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: White House warned CBS of lawsuit if Trump’s Dearborn interview was cut
Reporting by Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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