Sex, lies and landscaping: Trump’s finest press disaster

Six years ago, on 7 November 2020, Rudy Giuliani, then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, held a press conference that will live in infamy.

The US election had not yet been called, but all signs pointed to a Democratic victory that would oust Trump from the White House.

But look, why let a little thing like facts get in the way of a second term?

It didn’t take long for the team at Trump & Co. to claim voter fraud. So, as the major US networks prepared to declare Joe Biden the winner, Trump announced a press conference to address those pesky election issues.

He tweeted: “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 A.M.”

That was quickly followed by a clarification: “Four Season’s Landscaping!”

Then came a fresh announcement directing everyone to Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Ah. Yes. That Four Seasons. Of course.

The venue was near a porn shop named Fantasy Island and a crematorium, giving assembled journalists a generous selection of metaphors before anyone had even approached the microphone.

The press conference itself offered all the usual Greatest Hits.

There were allegations of electoral wrongdoing. There was indignation. There was Giuliani, confronted with the news that the networks had called the election for Biden, throwing his arms wide and looking skyward, like a bespectacled Jimmy Swaggart only with fewer tears, as though the television industry had personally betrayed him.

According to The Independent’s Richard Hall, who was there (and whose article on the event is a must-read), the spectacle ended with Trump’s personal lawyer struggling to be heard over “a man in his underpants shouting about George Soros”.

The entire scene was almost Caravaggio-like in its luscious atrocity. A true panacea for the pain and monotony of everyday existence.

Naturally, the assumption was that somebody had booked the wrong Four Seasons. Hey, these things happen! Perhaps an unfortunate Google search, or maybe the intern just clocked the worst Saturday of their professional life. 

But the explanation reported by The New York Times was, somehow, even better.

Giuliani and Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski had apparently intended to hold the press conference at the landscaping business all along. When they relayed the location to Trump, he misunderstood and assumed they meant the upscale hotel.

An understandable association. Although one imagines the words “Total Landscaping” might have warranted a follow-up question.

Still, there’s something magnificent about the explanation being that, actually, they had meant to do this.

Yes, the landscaping business. Yes, the car park. Thank you for checking.

Somewhere, a communications professional was presumably staring into the middle distance, mentally updating their LinkedIn.

For anyone who has ever worked in media, the scene had a particular, exquisite flavour. We spend our working lives receiving invitations promising an “iconic location” or an “unmissable announcement”. Usually, this means a hotel function room and a croissant sweating beneath cling wrap. 

Here, finally, was an event that delivered.

The location was unforgettable. The pictures were extraordinary. The message, admittedly, had hit a few snags on its journey from the lectern to the evening news.

That’s the trouble with staging a press conference beside a sex shop. You can bring all the talking points you like; the establishing shot has already filed its own story.

The landscaping business, meanwhile, recognised an opportunity when it arrived in the car park wearing a suit.

Soon there was merchandise: “Make America Rake Again” and “Lawn and Order”. For those whose home offices lacked the appropriate atmosphere of constitutional crisis, there was even a car park Zoom background.

A tidy commercial response to a very untidy afternoon.

And perhaps that explains why the whole thing remains so oddly precious. By November 2020, we had endured months of pandemic dread, isolation and the exhausting business of learning which people in our lives had become amateur epidemiologists on Facebook.

We were tired. We were frightened. Some of us had started making sourdough, which should tell you how bad things had become.

Then came Rudy, in a landscaping yard, giving the world something it could scarcely have commissioned.

No satirist would have got it past an editor. The venue alone would have been sent back with a note: Too much. Pull it back.

Reality, mercifully, has never accepted editorial feedback.

Of course, the allegations being aired were serious. Claiming an election had been stolen was a dangerous business, no matter how ridiculous the backdrop.

But the backdrop mattered. The campaign wanted authority, gravitas, a commanding image to beam into American homes.

It got a landscaping yard.

Six years later, I still think about the person who took that booking. Whether they paused. Whether they checked the diary. Whether, at any point, they put a hand over the receiver and said to a colleague: “You’re going to want to hear this.”

History rarely gives us the administrative details we deserve.

But it gave us Four Seasons Total Landscaping.