Bird was the word in woman’s election win
The cyclist who lost her job after giving the middle finger to President Donald Trump’s motorcade has found a new one after running for local office and ousting a Republican supervisor in Loudoun County, Va., on Tuesday.
The cyclist, Juli Briskman, had been active in local politics before, but in October 2017 she lifted that one specific finger to make a point and ended up gaining the national spotlight.
Trump had just finished a round of golf at his course in Potomac Falls, Va., when his motorcade approached Briskman, who, from the seat of her bicycle, kept her finger raised as the black SUVs passed — and repeated the gesture when she caught up to them in traffic.
News photographers captured images of her protest, and they quickly spread around the internet. The next week, Briskman was told she needed to resign from her job as a marketing analyst for Akima, a federal contractor in Herndon, Va., for violating its social media policy by posting the images online.
That same day, she signed up to work at polling stations in the 2017 state elections, she said.
“I couldn’t sit at home anymore and bite my nails and watch Rachel and Anderson,” she said in an interview Wednesday,
referring to cable news hosts Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Anderson Cooper of CNN.
In January, when she is scheduled to be sworn in as a new member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, Briskman will oversee that same Trump golf course — it is in her district.
“I don’t imagine there’s going to be very much coming across my desk relating to his golf course,” Briskman said. But, she added of the 800-acre property being in her district, “I take a little bit of enjoyment in that, of course.”
Briskman, 52, who ran as a Democrat, defeated the incumbent with just over 52 percent of the vote. She campaigned on updating the county’s environmental plan, adding affordable housing and increasing pay for teachers and firefighters. And while knocking on thousands of doors, only sometimes did she mention her famous single-digit gesture.
”I never led with it,” she said. “Voters want to know about the local issues.”