Landscape G.O.A.T.
It’s hard to stand out as the weirdest moment of the weirdest year in our lifetimes. And yet, in 2020, we did have an undisputed winner of this dubious honor. It was the most joked about, meme-able moment of the year. It drove the creation and sales of T-shirts and other related merch. I’m wearing a shirt. A photo from the event is my Zoom background. It was both ridiculous and sadly meaningful; a hat tip to four years of craziness and a foreshadowing of the weeks to come. No one has told the stories of the weirdness of this era better than NY Mag’s Olivia Nuzzi. So I’ll pass it over to her for The Full(est Possible) Story of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping Press Conference. “Whether it’s war and peace or public relations and gardening, sorting out the truth is a complicated endeavor when it relates to Donald Trump. Everyone involved in anything, no matter the size, no matter how stupid, seems to lie as a first resort, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, or to know just enough to send blame in another direction, and the person in that direction seems to lie also, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, but perhaps they have a theory that sends blame someplace else, and over there, too, you will find more liars, more know-nothings, and before long, a whole month will have passed, and you still haven’t filed your story about how the president’s attorney wound up undermining democracy in a parking lot off I-95 on a strip of cracked pavement in a run-down part of a city that ordinarily would command no consideration from the national political class or the very online public or the equally online mainstream media, which, when forced to look, found lots of reason to laugh.” (No one expected the most memorable moment of the most memorable year of the Trump era to be a moment of truth.)