Today we celebrate the anniversary of “Four Seasons Total Landscaping” – Mother Jones

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The city of Philadelphia has been the host of many historic moments – the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the birth of Gritty – but few have been as memorable (or as bizarre) as at that time Rudy Giuliani stood before a landscaping company and railed against the elections. fraud. The hastily-staged press conference a year ago today was a fitting end to Donald Trump’s not-so-great adventure in Washington, embodying almost all of the bizarre attributes of Trump’s chaotic presidency.

There was a seemingly obvious confusion of names: Instead of booking the Four Seasons hotel, Trump’s team ended up with a landscaping company in Northeast Philadelphia, down the street from ‘an adult bookstore. Then a familiar media swarm followed, making Four Seasons Total Landscaping a global sensation. Just days after the press conference, a Philly comedian hosted a “Fraud Street Run,” a nod to the city’s Broad Street Run, on a route from the landscaping company to the city. Four Seasons hotel. People have made the outdoor garage their Zoom background. Twitter turned it all into a song. Months later, a documentary was in the works, which was due to air this weekend on MSNBC to mark the first anniversary.

“We don’t really know how it happened. We heard that maybe it was a mistake or something, ”New York’s Olivia Nuzzi Mike Siravo, whose family owns Four Seasons Total Landscaping, told Olivia Nuzzi. “We kind of picked up the phone and said yes and erased some things and got there.”

The New York Times attributed the curious choice of location of the Trump campaign to confusion:

In reality, the error was not in the reservation, but in a scrambled phone game. Mr Giuliani and Trump’s campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski told the president their planned location for the press conference on Saturday morning and he misunderstood, assuming it was an upscale hotel, according to several people familiar with the matter.

In fact, the campaign “had always intended to hold the press conference in a friendlier part of town,” the Times reported, as pro-Biden protesters gathered downtown outside. the Convention Center and drowned Trump’s allies who tried to speak. the. What was factored into the decision is almost less interesting than his unfortunate timing, which coincided with the Associated Press’s projection of Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania, which officially won him the presidency.

Trump’s spurious and inconsistent attempt to delegitimize the election would culminate, nearly two months later, with the Jan.6 insurgency. But on that November Saturday, all he had to show was a former New York mayor, standing in front of a garage, leaning over windmills.

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