Post-election celebrations took many forms this past weekend after President-elect Joe Biden was projected to be the 46th president of the US. Those ranged from mass dance parties in the street to countless online expressions of some much-needed collective schadenfreude at the expense of Donald Trump and his surrogates who refuse to accept the reality of his loss.
But none quite measure up to the group of furries, led by YouTuber and virtual reality enthusiast CooperTom, who re-created Trump’s bizarre and sad press conference outside a landscaping business that happens to share the same name as a luxury hotel chain.
They did so using VRChat, the massively multiplayer online VR simulator that lets you create an avatar of your choosing — including anthropomorphic animals — and socialize with others in virtual worlds you or others design.
The Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference is perhaps the symbolic epitome of the Trump campaign’s final death throes. The event, at which Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was informed mid-speech of Trump’s loss but dismissed it as the product of election fraud, was located next to an adult entertainment store called Fantasy Island and nearby a crematorium and prison in the outskirts of the city that helped win Biden the election. And due to a lack of explanation from Trump campaign staffers, we don’t know why they chose it, except that perhaps someone thought they were booking the Four Seasons Hotel located 10 miles away.
Either way, Four Seasons Total Landscaping has emerged as one of the defining memes of the weekend, providing the internet with endless entertainment and making a small business that advertises lawn maintenance and snow plowing the site of what could ultimately become the Trump campaign’s impossibly poetic public sendoff.
Now, it’s immortalized forever in the realm of VR, thanks to CooperTom’s efforts on Sunday, which involved more than five hours of work re-creating the scene of Giuliani and crew’s speaker and podium setup, the garage door emblazoned with Trump logos, and even the now-iconic “presidential hose wheel.” The map is available in VRChat now with the description “a great place for a press conference.”
It’s not clear how the space will be used in the future. The initial group of furries that populated the map’s launch party mostly congratulated CooperTom on his astounding attention to detail and wondered whether any one of them would begin giving a mock speech at the podium before someone began setting off virtual fireworks.
But as of Monday afternoon, it’s already been updated with a subtle design change:
