Paul Wood

Trump 2024! He definitely lost – but he’s not finished yet

Getty images

Donald Trump’s increasingly outrageous attempts to contest the results of the US presidential election were given their absurd symbol early on with what one commentator called The Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco. 

A week ago, with the decisive votes being counted in the last, critical states in the election, with Trump making a forlorn attempt to persuade Americans he had been cheated out of victory, someone on the campaign blundered. They were supposed to book the Four Seasons in Philadelphia for a press conference by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Instead, they booked Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a gardening company in an industrial area of north-east Philly, somewhere out near I-95. Giuliani’s press conference was held in the parking lot. Nearby was a cheque cashing place, an empty warehouse for rent, a crematorium and an adult bookstore: ‘DVDs, lotions, viewing booths. A small, family owned business for 40 years. FREE batteries with your purchase ALWAYS!’ The porn shop was called Fantasy Island.

Total Landscaping says that all of its clients, big or small, are given ‘the same precision and attention to detail’. Precision and attention to detail are words never used to describe Donald Trump, or his campaign. Otherwise, they would have had teams of lawyers ready with injunctions in the contested states the day after the election. For months, Trump had been using a bullhorn to let everyone know his strategy would be to challenge the election itself. 

But on 4 November, according to the New York Times, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was phoning around looking for their own James Baker, the elder statesman who fixed the Florida mess for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. 

When the networks finally called the race for Joe Biden, Giuliani was still at the podium in the carpark of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

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Written by
Paul Wood
Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war

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