Surely, the Trump campaign must have assumed they had booked something related to the Four Seasons hotel only to roll with the alternative they found upon arrival. Or so the theory went.
The question of whether Team Trump messed up the booking has never fully been addressed, despite serious reportorial attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery. But this weekend brought a new piece of data that suggests that they were indeed just drawn to the name of the company.
A month before Giuliani made Four Seasons Total Landscaping a perfectly odd footnote in U.S. political history, the Trump campaign made a fairly sizable expense to another landscaping company with an almost identical name.
Sometime in late September, the Republican National Committee booked an event staging and property company called Four Seasons Landscape and Property Services to spruce up a location for a West Coast fundraising swing for then-President Donald Trump. The Santa Clarita-based company charged the committee $48,515.78 for the job. The total was paid by Trump Victory — a joint fundraising venture of the RNC and the Trump campaign — on Dec. 15. It showed up for the first time in a campaign finance report filed by Trump Victory on Saturday and immediately led to speculation that this was the bill for the Giuliani presser.
In fact, they were two separate Trump campaign events, each involving a landscaping company named Four Seasons.
In a phone interview, Dan Blumel, the owner of Four Seasons Landscape and Property Services, relayed that the event for which his company did work took place in October. He did not say where specifically, citing a nondisclosure agreement with the client. But he did reveal that one major hiccup fouled up the planning.
“Sadly,” Blumel said, “Mr. Trump got Covid.”
Indeed, Trump’s illness — which was so serious that he had to be moved to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — led to the scrambling of two West Coast fundraisers: a $25,000-a-plate event in Beverly Hills and a $2,800-a-plate one at a private Newport Beach residence. Blumel said that the event he worked on took place but that the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner attended instead of him.
And that, Blumel thought, was that. Trump recovered from Covid. The election happened. Joe Biden won.
Except, it wasn’t so simple. A few days after the vote, Giuliani held his infamous presser at the similarly named Four Seasons Total Landscaping, turning an obscure company into an emblem of the shambolic conspiracy hunts that were to follow. Blumel’s phone blew up with texts from friends and acquaintances asking the obvious question: Is this, in any way at all, related to you?
“We happen to have the same name as the other one,” he said. “But no, we are not affiliated.”
