Four Seasons Landscaping back in the spotlight one year on from Donald Trump's loss

One year has passed since the infamous press conference was held by Donald Trump's lawyer outside Four Season's Total Landscaping.

trump

Attorney for the President, Rudy Giuliani, speaks at a news conference in the parking lot of a landscaping company on November 7, 2020 in Philadelphia. Source: Getty Images

Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani stood in an asphalt car park outside a small landscaping company at this time last year and made baseless claims of electoral fraud.

As he spoke between a fire extinguisher and a yellow hose, Mr Giuliani was notified midway through the press conference that Joe Biden had won the election.

Positioned next door to an adult book shop and across the road from a crematorium, Four Seasons Total Landscaping gave birth to countless memes and jokes.
Questions were raised as to whether Mr Trump’s team had mistakenly booked the landscaping firm instead of the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel.

Initially, Mr Trump had tweeted “Lawyers Press Conference at Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 A.M".

He followed up the tweet with a second post “Four Season’s Landscaping!" before sending out another tweet: “Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping — 11:30am!”.

Marie Sivaro, owner of Four Seasons, said Mr Tump's team chose their business after searching for suitable locations on Google Maps.

“We think they got the idea after they did an overhead view,” she told The Independent.

“If you look outside, you can’t see up into here. So they blocked the street. They could have called 10 other people."
At the time, the 65-year-old said she felt the small family-owned business couldn’t say “no” to Mr Trump’s team, adding, “this is the president."

“We weren’t interested in the political part of it. We were just here doing our duty as citizens," she said.

The relatively unknown landscaping company was thrust into the international spotlight as the public and journalists tried to make sense of what exactly had just happened.
To mark the one-year anniversary of the press conference, a documentary of the saga aired on MSNBC on Monday.

“We just had no idea what we were in for,” Ms Sivaro says in the trailer. “I remember asking did we make a mistake?”.

At first, the Sivaros said the attention was overwhelmingly negative, with haters flooding the company with emails and phone calls.

But things turned around when then they decided to find humour in the situation, leveraging the publicity they had received.

"We were just ordinary people running a commercial landscaping business," Sean Middleton, director of sales of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, told MSNBC.

“We were able to capitalise on this attention in a very positive way.”

"In a million years, we never could have expected that the press conference would turn out the way it was."
The company has since raked in USD$1.5 million from shirt sales and has even appeared in a Super Bowl commercial.

They created a Zoom background and sold merchandise with slogans like “Make America Rake Again (we are not a hotel),” “Lawn and Order,” and “Your Campaign is Dead, But Your Grass Doesn’t Have to Be".

Four Seasons Total Landscaping received so many Yelp reviews following the press conference that the site branded its page with an “unusual activity alert” and temporarily disabled comments.

“When I was losing an election back in 2004, I knew exactly where to turn for a desperate, last-minute news conference,” one person wrote on Google.

“Four Seasons Total Landscaping has the best combination of gardening and Pennsylvania electoral law litigation services. I didn’t win the election, but I sure had a great news conference.”

In the MSNBC trailer, Ms Siravo’s son Michael praised the business’ response to the infamous event, dubbing it the ultimate “American underdog story”.


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4 min read
Published 8 November 2021 2:46pm
By Eden Gillespie
Source: SBS News


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