Woman Who Lost Job for Flipping Off Trump’s Motorcade Wins an Election: 'Sweet Justice'
The Virginia woman who was fired after flipping the bird at President Donald Trump‘s motorcade in 2017 has a new job title after winning a local election on Tuesday.
According to CBS News, Juli Briskman, a Democrat, won a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors with 52.4 percent of the vote, beating eight-year Republican incumbent Suzanne Volpe.
The victory marks Briskman’s first time in elected office.
“It’s feeling fantastic, it’s feeling surreal,” Briskman told The Washington Post after her win. “The last two years have been quite a ride. Now we’re helping to flip Loudoun blue.”
Her district also includes a Trump golf course, according to the Post. “Isn’t that sweet justice?” she told the paper.
Two years ago, Briskman, 52, made national news when she was photographed raising her middle finger at Trump’s motorcade while she was riding her bicycle in Northern Virginia. She even shared the viral photo to her own social media pages.
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“I don’t employ that gesture very often but I wanted to express my opinion, and I was faced with tinted, bullet-proof glass, and I was assuming the person in the car was who I thought it was,” Briskman told BuzzFeed News in 2018.
But as a result, Briskman lost her job as a marketing analyst for Akima. The company pointed to its social media policy, Briksman said, according to The New York Times and the Post. She later sued and won severance pay.
Last September, Briskman announced that that she was opposing Volpe in the upcoming election.
“You might know me as the woman who was fired for flipping off the Presidential motorcade,” she wrote in her campaign announcement. “And while it may be the most public display of my political opinion and activism, I have been deeply involved in the Loudoun County community for nearly 20 years.”
Briskman told the Post that her notoriety from 2017 helped her raise over $150,000 for her 2019 race.
If voters expressed their displeasure with the president, Briskman said she always had the perfect response: “I’m the woman who flipped off the motorcade and lost my job. And they would say, ‘Oh yeah, that woman!’ “
Briskman was not the only Virginia Democrat to win big on Tuesday. The party won control of Virginia’s House and Senate, unifying the state government under Democratic control for the first time in decades.
