Juli Briskman was cycling down a road in Loudoun County, Virginia in October 2017 when she spotted a motorcade whisking president Donald Trump to destinations unknown.

Briskman did the first thing that popped into her head: she threw her middle finger in the air and flipped off the president. An image, captured by a White House photographer, promptly went viral and Briskman, who was then working as a government contractor for Akima LLC in Virginia, was fired from her job for violating the company’s social media policy.

“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,’” Briskman said told The Huffington Post at the time. “Basically, you cannot have ‘lewd’ or ‘obscene’ things in your social media. So they were calling flipping him off ‘obscene’.” A GoFundMe launched after Briskman lost her job raised more than $100,000 for her, with organisers calling Briskman’s protest “an inspiration to us all”. (Briskman later sued her former employer and won a severance claim.)

Remember the woman who flipped off Trump? She’s now an elected politician