Séamas O'Reilly: The US election of 2020 ended with the honk of history's greatest-ever clown car
Rudy Giuliani speaks to the media at a press conference held in the back parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping on November 7, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The press conference took place just minutes after news networks announced that Joe Biden had won the presidency over Donald Trump after it was projected that he had won the state of Pennsylvania. Pic: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
I celebrated an anniversary this week. It’s an important one for my family and I.
Had I thought more about it, I would have booked some time off, perhaps taken the kids out of school and made a day of it, gathered with a few close friends to watch video of the event, so we could while away the hours, crying with laughter at a beautiful day we’ll never allow ourselves to forget.
It could, and should, have been one of those occasions where you start drinking early in the day.
Costumes would have been warmly received and may well be mandated in future. When we do, we will not be commemorating a wedding or birthday, nor any event at which we were ourselves were present, but the single funniest thing that has happened in world politics this century, and possibly in human history.
I speak of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference which, three years ago this week, lit up a turbulent American post-election like a briefcase bomb of pure farce.
It pains me to even imagine the words “Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference” mean less to you than they do me, but here’s a brief precis of its events, just in case.
On November 7, 2020, while America awaited the results of the presidential election, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani held a press conference to discuss electoral fraud.
This event was held, not at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Philadelphia, but in the carpark of a garden centre named Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
The Trump team began the conference in front of the store’s garage door, on which TRUMP 2020 posters had been crudely affixed and things only became more absurd from there.
It was very clear, from the outset, that something very funny was happening. Journalists noted it was odd they were being summoned to a non-descript small business in Holmesburg, 16 miles — and a full 45-minute drive — away from Philadelphia’s historic city centre.
Trump’s team refused to answer questions as to why it had been held there, and not somewhere more amenable to their cause or, at the very least, somewhere easier for the world’s press to locate and set up within.
Almost immediately, it was thought that the Trump Team had made a mistake.
Four Seasons, as a name, is surely more redolent of the famous hotel chain, a much more usual site for press conferences of this nature. This was not merely common sense reasoning, it should be stressed, but backed up by Trump’s own announcement of the event itself via Twitter.
“Lawyers Press Conference at Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11.00 A.M.” he wrote, before correcting himself eight minutes later with the words “Four Season’s [sic] Landscaping!” and two minutes after that with “Big press conference today in Philadeplhia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping — 11.30am!”
It did, admittedly, seem odd that in the space of 10 minutes, in what might even be termed a scramble, the embattled President of the US had pushed a conference discussing said embattlement back by half an hour, while appearing to correct the venue from a luxury hotel in the heart of central Philadelphia to the car park of a landscaping business in an industrial estate.
The former is, after all, a five-star hotel designed by architect Norman Foster, offering beautiful views of the city’s skyline within the tenth tallest building in the US, where guests can ascend to the 59th floor to avail of a six-course menu by a Michelin starred chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, surrounded by art and music curated exclusively by Brian Eno.
The latter is a suburban gardening centre with a garage door and enough parking for a dozen cars, beside a crematorium and a sex shop. (Between, as many observed, a dick and a charred place.)
Trump’s team refused to answer any questions about why they were having the conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, hoping instead to launch straight into the important matters at hand.
Thankfully, the secret to any great comedy is timing and, after four full days of grinding stalemate since the polls had opened, CNN announced a Biden victory just minutes before Giuliani took the microphone to speak, framed by several reams of garden hose on a floor of cracked concrete.
Once Giuliani was in full flow, a reporter interrupted to report that all of the major news networks had now followed CNN’s lead in declaring for the President’s opponent.
“Who was it called by?” snapped Giuliani, as ranks of journalists began packing up and leaving.
“All the networks” came the reply, leading the President’s Attorney to, not figuratively, but literally, adopt a mock praying stance and declaim to the heavens, “All the ... oh my goodness ... all the networks. Wow! All the networks! We have to forget about the law. Judges don’t count. All the networks, all the networks”.
In the remarks that followed, garbled assertions were made about voting irregularities, chiefly that mail-in ballots were being cast on behalf of already dead people. No evidence for such claims was presented, but neither were there many people left to make them to, as the crowd slowly shrank away from this unfolding disaster, to cover history being made elsewhere.
No coherent explanation has ever been offered as to what actually happened, barring the obvious presumption that they wanted to book the Four Seasons but were denied and, with the studied arrogance of psychopaths, decided to style it out in a preposterously unsuitable venue that had a similar-sounding name, at the exact moment the election was lost.
Frankly, no other explanation is necessary, or desirable.
It is tempting, sometimes, to think that things can’t possibly be as stupid or inane as they seem at first.
In the case of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, we should, for once, celebrate that they were.
