If we got a laugh out of it, that means we should post it,” Michael says. “We would just bounce ideas off each other. They decided to join in with the joke, and turned the company’s social media accounts into meme-producing machines. Michael and former sales director Sean Middleton saw an opportunity in the madness. Michael immediately went to buy more cameras for their home and Marie checked in with the local police precinct to let them know what was happening.īut then things started to shift, partly because of how the team reacted to the attention. Other people were leaving flowers outside like it was a funeral for Trump’s death.” You don’t know what somebody’s going to do. Marie adds: “All of a sudden people are sending me emails: ‘F U, F Trump.’ I mean, I didn’t even know you could make writing that big.” “People were threatening us and calling us out.” “The first 24 hours was scary,” says Michael. It was a political event, after all, and the politics found them. It was just like the comedy wrote itself,” says Michael.īut not everyone was happy with them. “The media kind of helped us out with it by reporting that they didn’t know if they mixed up the Four Seasons Hotel with us. The Sivaro family, who woke up one day to find themselves in the eye of a media storm, watched the joke spiral, but they have maintained that the campaign chose their company because of its location. It was that confusion and uncertainty that propelled the day’s events from an awkward sideshow into a comical, circus-like ending to the Trump presidency – from the Big Lie to the Big Joke.
It has been a year since that day, and a mystery that has endured ever since was whether the Trump team actually meant to hold their press conference at this family-run business, and not the Four Seasons Hotel in the city centre. The election had been called for Joe Biden. No sooner had Trump’s onetime personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani began a conspiracy theory-laden monologue about alleged voter fraud in Pennsylvania than reporters in front of him started to leave. We were just here doing our duty as citizens.” “We weren’t interested in the political part of it. This is the president,” she tells The Independent in the back office of their building.
“I said, I don’t think we could say no to this. Marie Sivaro, Michael’s mother and the owner of the business, didn’t think twice.