Spencer Pratt, the False Prophet of Los Angeles
Reality show villain and Donald Trump–endorsed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt has turned his bitter grievances and dark fantasies into a viable campaign. But LA needs a political vision larger than one celebrity’s personal ambition and rage.
Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt does appear genuinely aggrieved by the state of Los Angeles, even if the LA in his mind — a place where wildfires are passively tolerated and homeless people are high on “super meth” — doesn’t exist. (Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images)
In January, the Los Angeles–born reality television star Spencer Pratt published a memoir titled The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain. Reviewing the book for CalMatters, Jim Newton wrote that Pratt, who rose to fame as a villainous character on MTV’s “The Hills,” presents himself as “selfish, undisciplined and unprincipled”: a man who stole a friend’s photographs and sold them to Us Weekly and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on designer suits and ammunition to soothe himself when his reality television career stalled.
Little in Pratt’s biography suggests he had his sights set on a political career. But by the time he was promoting his book, that had changed. In January of last year, the most destructive fire in the history of Los Angeles tore through Pratt’s neighborhood in the Pacific Palisades. Pratt and his wife, fellow reality television star Heidi Montag, lost their home, as did thousands of others including Pratt’s parents. Pratt’s reaction to the devastation was fury: he blamed the local elected officials for failing to stop it and launched a new chapter of his meandering career as a righteous activist.
“For the last eight months, my life’s goal, aside from obviously being a father and a husband, is getting accountability for the gross, criminal negligence that burned down my house,” Pratt told the Hollywood Reporter last fall.
Pratt has myriad objections to the way the city and the state of California handled the fire. Just weeks after losing their homes, Pratt, his wife, and a handful of their neighbors sued the city of Los Angeles and the city’s Department of Water and Power over reports that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which typically services the Palisades, was empty and awaiting repairs when the fire began and was thus unable to fill nearby hydrants and tankers. There have been suggestions that the hills surrounding the Palisades should have been cleared of brush and other vegetation and that more fire trucks should have been waiting nearby.
Fire experts have said since the beginning that the fire’s intensity resulted from a confluence of natural factors that would have overwhelmed firefighters “no matter the level of preparation.” But that hasn’t stopped Pratt. He has broadcast his fury with California’s elected leaders on his podcast and social media channels, in conversations with Trump administration officials, and in testimony before Congress. In the wake of the fire that reduced his home to ash and debris, Pratt has campaigned like a man possessed — driven, depending on who you believe, by the impact of the devastating loss, by a finely cultivated instinct for grift, or both.
Pratt launched his campaign for mayor of Los Angeles on the first anniversary of the fire, and now, four months later, he is threatening to topple expectations and advance to a November runoff with incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.
“Spencer has the ultimate personal story,” said Mike Bonin, a former city councilor who now serves as the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute:
And people can relate to that. While what happened in Palisades was clearly a perfect storm of many things, not the least of which is climate change, the government failed us or the government betrayed us is a very simple narrative. And he’s a very clear character in a story: here’s a guy who lived there, lost his home, is pissed off, and he’s running for office to seek retribution, more or less.
That narrative is paramount to Pratt’s campaign, because while he does appear genuinely aggrieved by the state of his city — warning ominously, for example, about homeless people on “super meth” — Pratt’s actual platform is not particularly arresting. He has promised to reject “defund-style politics” and “prioritize frontline policing,” to clean up city streets and neighborhoods and make them “camera-ready.” He rails against the “Homeless Industrial Complex” and casts homelessness primarily as a problem of lawlessness and addiction, promising to clear encampments and strictly enforce public space laws while downplaying housing and shelter shortages by insisting people are on the streets by choice. He has promised a comprehensive audit of the city’s emergency preparedness infrastructure and performance audits of existing city programs, vowing to cut wasteful spending. He has received the backing of a cohort of local billionaires whose interests he would, presumably, pliantly serve.
It is, in short, a version of a campaign familiar to the residents of any number of major American cities: a vow to take a punitive approach criminal justice and homelessness, back the cops, support big business, cut administrative bloat, and get back to civic basics. It was the kind of pitch Los Angeles voters rejected in 2022, when the billionaire developer Rick Caruso — another white, male University of Southern California graduate with an exclusive Westside address — fell short in a runoff against Bass.
But while Caruso had never held public office when he ran four years ago, he was a fixture of LA’s civic life: a well-connected real estate mogul who had served as a commissioner for the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water and served on the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners. Pratt, despite his fame in reality television, is not similarly connected to any sort of political establishment. He is a pure vector for rage.
From Frustration to Fury
What is most notable about Pratt’s campaign, then, is not its policy platform but its style. Pratt has resisted comparisons to Donald Trump, insisting that he instead feels “like Obama,” but Pratt entered the race as a registered Republican who made his name in reality television, and his promise at the end of his viral campaign ad to “get the golden age of Los Angeles back” is strikingly reminiscent of Trump’s signature promise to restore American greatness. Trump himself has bestowed his blessing on Pratt’s campaign.
Like Trump, Pratt has exhibited a fondness for AI-generated videos: a recent effort portrayed him arriving in a Batman outfit to save a smoldering Los Angeles from a socialist militia and unfeeling leaders like Bass, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris; another ad portrayed him as a Jedi battling Bass with a lightsaber. Pratt has also launched derisive nicknames for his competitors: Bass is Karen “Basura,” City Councilor Nithya Raman is “crazy,” crime isn’t declining, Spencer Pratt — the man who admittedly once spent half a million dollars on designer handbags for his wife — is a lone voice of reason in the madness of a dystopian Los Angeles. He is, he says, Bass’s worst nightmare.
Unlike Trump, however, Pratt appears to be fueled by the anger of a man who has lived a life of privilege and come untethered in the wake of an unforeseen personal catastrophe. A sympathetic view is that Pratt has built a campaign on the basis of what we might label climate grief — but because Pratt rejects climate change as an underlying cause of the fire, because he rejects the notion that the Palisades burned just as the Palisades and Malibu have burned many times before, because he appears incapable of grasping that some of the homeless people he inveighs against may be mourning the loss of their homes too, it’s a grief arrested in anger. Its political horizon is limited and ugly.
Nevertheless, Pratt’s message is clearly resonating with a segment of Los Angeles voters. That may be because no matter how narcissistic Pratt’s anger is, it’s an anger big enough to encompass a variety of other frustrations about the state of an economically stagnant, persistently unequal city in which people are visibly struggling and local leadership has been unable to make major impacts.
“Los Angeles is at a time where there are lots of problems right now,” Bonin said. “The economy is suffering, city services are poor, there’s still a big homelessness crisis, there’s an affordability crisis, particularly in affordable housing, we’ve had the ICE raids — a lot of people just don’t feel happy.”
Bonin pointed to a recent survey from the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, that found that LA County residents are less satisfied with their quality of life than at any point in the survey’s history. Survey respondents were particularly displeased with the state of education, transportation, and the cost of living, while nearly a third of respondents said they fear they or someone close to them could be deported.
Nithya Raman, a two-term city councilor running to Bass’s left, could conceivably and may still benefit from the antiestablishment fervor roiling Los Angeles. But while Raman has struggled to consolidate progressive support and solidify her hold on a position in the November runoff, the tenor of Pratt’s pitch has struck a chord.
“People in this country, generally, left and right, are frustrated with the effectiveness of their government — for all kinds of different reasons,” Newton said. “And this is not brand new, but growing: it is interesting to me how many of those people turn from that frustration to just fury.”
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Whether there is enough fury in Los Angeles to elect a conservative mayor for the first time in more than three decades remains to be seen. It is as yet unclear just how broadly relatable the circumstances of the loss of Pratt’s home are in a city where a sizable majority of residents are renters who don’t make in five years what Pratt has spent on Birkin bags. It is also unclear how someone as petulant and immature as Pratt might hold up over the course of a long campaign.
Bass, fighting for her political life with an approval rating worse than Donald Trump’s, may be Pratt’s biggest supporter: in a city where Trump received just over a quarter of the vote, a general election matchup against an outspoken Republican appears to be Bass’s easiest path to a second term. Earlier this month, the LA County Federation of Labor, which has endorsed Bass, produced an attack ad against Pratt that appeared aimed at boosting his profile among the city’s conservative voters. Raman called the ploy “cynical” and the strategy of boosting Pratt’s chances of qualifying for the runoff “scary.”
For Pratt, it’s seemingly all or nothing. He’s said he’ll leave the city if he is not elected mayor and will instead live somewhere where his children don’t have to see “naked zombies” roaming the streets. Of course, the question of where Pratt might live is not entirely as simple as who is elected mayor in November: while Pratt and Montag purchased their home for a cool $2.5 million in 2017, Montag told the Independent last year that the couple could not afford to rebuild. A payout from California’s last-resort insurer, the FAIR Plan, totaled around $1 million. Pratt is reportedly staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, while Montag and their children reside in Carpinteria, just south of Santa Barbara.
Pratt writes in his autobiography that his brain is full of “apocalyptic visions” but also “zeroes and ones, pixels and dollar signs.” In some ways, he is a quintessential LA character, starring now in a virtual reality show about the city. But Los Angeles is a real place, not just the subject of Spencer Pratt’s bitter grievances and dark fantasies — and it needs a political vision larger than one celebrity’s personal ambition and rage.