Tourists posing for photos, passengers in cars that drive by the White House and pedestrians caught unaware by passing motorcades have all made increasing use of the vulgar gesture since President Donald Trump came to town. | POLITICO Illustration/Getty Images and iStock White House Saluting the Trump administration, not so nicely With raised middle fingers, many in and around D.C. are telling the president how they really feel.

Forget the bald eagle. The unofficial mascot of Donald Trump’s capital is a very different kind of bird.

At the White House, the nearby Trump International Hotel and wherever the presidential motorcade goes, Washingtonians are greeting this presidency with an extended middle finger.


As episodes like the separation of migrant families and the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court continue to inflame passions in Washington, D.C., these one-fingered salutes have become a pervasive marker of an administration under siege in its own city.

Tourists posing for photos, passengers in the cars that drive by the White House off Lafayette Square and pedestrians caught unaware by passing motorcades have all made increasing use of the vulgar gesture since Trump came to town. Some flip the bird subtly. Others make a show of it.

“It shows that people feel emboldened to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable,” said one former Trump White House official who noticed more than a few middle fingers aimed his way as he entered and left the White House complex during his stint there. “I think as a country there’s no more filter.”

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Of course, no one has done more to foster vulgarity in politics in the Trump era than Trump himself. He made a habit of cursing on the campaign trail and has generally disregarded all norms of civility, practically daring his critics to respond in kind. So they have.

For Brandon Walker, who raised not one but two middle fingers toward the Trump Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in August, the gesture was a spur-of-the-moment expression of disgust. Walker, a 22-year-old student at Montgomery College in Maryland, had ventured downtown to counterdemonstrate against a white nationalist rally planned in Washington that day when he came up with another idea for expressing himself.

“It was an accumulation of opportunity,” he recalled. “We were walking on the way to the rally, we were kind of lost, and we just happened to end up in the front of the Trump on the way there, and I just saw this was an opportunity for this to happen.”

No fan of Trump, Walker was further incensed by the barricades and police officers guarding the building, protection not afforded to anyone else. “The whole city was in danger of being in a riot, and the only thing that was really protected was the Trump Hotel,” he said.

So, out in front of the main entrance, Walker, draped in a Chicago Bulls jersey, stuck both hands up, extended his middle fingers and cocked his thumbs out to the sides, holding the pose so that a friend could immortalize the moment with photos.

At the time, Walker said, he thought he was among the first people to have flipped off the hotel. In fact, he was far from it. A perusal of Instagram photos taken at the hotel and at the White House show that it is common not just to flip the bird at those locales, but to post about it on social media, as well.

A family from Charleston, S.C., maintains an Instagram account devoted mostly to their children’s drawings and wholesome outings. But among the photos of museums and monuments from an August trip to Washington, they have also posted disembodied middle fingers aimed at both the White House and the Trump Hotel.

The gestures — generally protected as free expression under the First Amendment — serve as reminders that at least some of Washington has greeted the Trump administration as a hostile occupying power. Former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden would occasionally show their faces in public here, popping into D.C. burger joints to grab lunch and make some political point. Trump, on the other hand, tends to venture only to his own hotel for high-dollar fundraisers and gatherings of supporters.

When Trump’s aides do show up in public in or near Washington, the reception can be hostile. This summer, during the height of protests against the administration’s policy of separating migrant families detained at the border, senior presidential adviser Stephen Miller, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders each drew notice at restaurants. They were variously heckled, shouted at and asked to leave.

Juli Briskman flips off the presidential motorcade last year near Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Va. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

In this frenzied atmosphere, silently raising a middle finger has almost taken on an air of dignified restraint.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the fingers, but they have not escaped the administration’s notice.

One former White House staffer said they have been a part of the job since the moment it began. The staffer recalled arriving for his first day of work at the White House around noon on the Sunday after the inauguration. Among the protesters on Pennsylvania Avenue, he saw a healthy smattering of middle fingers aimed in his direction as he and a group of colleagues entered the North Gate in vans.

Once inside, the fingers are mostly out of sight and out of mind, said another former staffer, who pointed out that few staffers have offices facing Pennsylvania Avenue, and that those who do are mostly stuck looking at the North Lawn, which sits higher than the West Wing.

The flipping phenomenon is not limited to Washington. In New York, a city built on fewer pretensions of civility, flipping off Trump Tower has become something of a pastime . In Chicago, flipping off that city's Trump Tower came into vogue during the presidential primaries, when a valet at a nearby hotel told the news site DNAinfo that he saw “at least four people a day“ doing it. There is an entire Instagram account, @FlipTrumpOff, dedicated to saluting the nation’s Trump-branded properties.

In fact, flipping off Trump has proven a popular activity all over the world. Press pool reports from the president’s travel regularly note the middle fingers that greet the presidential motorcade. They popped up during an April visit to Key West, Fla.; a June drive back from Camp David along Interstate 66 in Falls Church, Va.; July’s trip to Helsinki, Finland, for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin; and last month’s excursion to Manhattan for the United Nations General Assembly.

Obama’s motorcade sometimes attracted middle fingers, too — from opponents of his policies, as well as opponents of the presidential-scale traffic jams the motorcades create — but the gesture seemed to be lobbed far less frequently at the 44th president. Pool reports recorded middle fingers aimed at the motorcade only four times over Obama‘s two terms. They noted fingers directed at Trump on six occasions in just his first year, starting on his first week in office, with multiple one-fingered salutes greeting his arrival at a Republican retreat at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel on the Thursday after his inauguration.

And flipping the bird at Obama’s motorcade never launched anyone’s political career. The same cannot be said for Trump. Last October, a Virginia woman flipped off the president’s motorcade while biking in Sterling, the home of Trump National Golf Club. A photo of the act went viral and earned her national notoriety. It also got her fired from her job with a government contractor, prompting her to sue the employer and raise nearly $100,000 from an online crowdfunding campaign. Last month, the woman, Juli Briskman, announced that she was running for a seat on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors in Northern Virginia.

One of the former White House aides said staffers couldn’t help but notice the gestures when looking out from the motorcade. “It seems like the two symbols are the big group of people flipping you off and the people with American flags,” he said.

But the former staffer has never heard the president or anyone else bother to remark upon the obscene gestures, which have faded into the background of their hostile surroundings.

“At some point,” he said, “everything becomes normal.”