Date | November 7, 2020 |
---|---|
Time | 11:30 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time) |
Duration | 37:21 |
Venue | Four Seasons Total Landscaping |
Location | Holmesburg, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
Coordinates | 40°01′34″N 75°01′48″W / 40.0262°N 75.0301°W |
Type | Press conference |
Motive | Discussion of the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the ballot-counting process |
Organized by | Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign |
Participants |
On November 7, 2020, four days after the United States presidential election was held, Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and an attorney for then-president Donald Trump, hosted a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a small business in the Holmesburg neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The event was held at the company's garage door and parking lot to discuss the status of the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the ballot-counting process in the state, where the president's apparent lead over Joe Biden in the first ballots counted had shifted to a shortfall as mailed-in ballots were counted for Philadelphia, historically a heavily Democratic city.
The site of the press conference, a local landscaping business, was unexpected. Many journalists and others quickly observed a comical aspect to its location, near a sex shop and a crematorium. This site selection led to speculation that the Trump campaign meant to book the upscale Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia, five city blocks from the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where Philadelphia's ballots were being counted. Shortly after Giuliani began talking to the assembled reporters, the Associated Press projected Biden as the winner of the Pennsylvania vote and thus the nationwide election. Several news outlets characterized the event as the symbolic end of Trump's presidency.[2][3][4]
The event was ridiculed by journalists and users of social media. It garnered further ridicule after it emerged that one of the witnesses who spoke at the event was a convicted sex offender.[5] It resulted in lawyers withdrawing from the legal team that the Trump campaign had assembled to challenge the election results. In response to the press conference, a Four Seasons–themed charity run was created, and the landscaping company capitalized on the newfound attention by selling T-shirts and other merchandise emblazoned with "Make America Rake Again"—a play on Trump's Make America Great Again slogan.[6]
C-SPAN video
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Independent story
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Daily Beast story
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).Vox story
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).sex offender1
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha>
tags or {{efn}}
templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}}
template or {{notelist}}
template (see the help page).