Spencer Pratt doesn’t approve of all the Trump comparisons.
The former reality TV star gets them a lot these days. He’s a celebrity — best known for his breakout role on MTV’s “The Hills” two decades ago — who is now running for mayor of Los Angeles. He doesn’t have much experience in politics or city government, but he comes with an A-list Rolodex and a built-in fanbase that includes more than five million followers across X, Meta and TikTok. He’s bombastic, confident and has a habit of rambling his way through speeches that veer into conspiracy theory. And, by his own admission, he has harbored an absurd, borderline toxic obsession with money since he was a teen.
Pratt, 42, is a registered Republican, but rejects the notion that he is aligned with MAGA or following in Trump’s footsteps. In February, while gathering signatures at an early campaign event on Ventura Boulevard in Encino, he joined the livestream of celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton to give his elevator pitch to be mayor. When Hilton asked about claims he’s a MAGA candidate, Pratt pushed back.
“I’m not a political person — I’m somebody with basic expectations of our tax money and our quality of living,” he told Hilton.
Pratt’s primary motivation for the career pivot, he said, stemmed from the Palisades fire that ravaged his neighborhood last January, destroying his family home and killing a dozen of his neighbors. He blames Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom for the devastation, which he believes was preventable were it not for the “corruption” in city government.
Talking about the fires on Hilton’s show, Pratt began to ramble, meandering through allegations of deceit and misconduct at the hands of a mysterious “they” who he said were misappropriating fire recovery funds and purposefully “increasing homelessness” in LA to defraud taxpayers.
This election, Pratt said, is a matter of good versus “evil,” and he’s waging “spiritual warfare” on behalf of his future constituents, who, in Pratt’s telling, have fairly simple requests.
“They just want to go on TikTok, have their Wi-Fi working, and be able to not step in human poop or a fentanyl needle on the walk to get their matcha. That’s who I represent,” he said.
As a Republican in a deep-blue city, Pratt was a longshot candidate on day one of his campaign. He’s also a career entertainer with no experience running for office, let alone running a city of 3.8 million people. And he has earned support from MAGA loyalists, establishment Republicans and even Trump himself, making him a tough sell in a city and state the president casts as a leftist “trash heap.” Pratt, too, seems to prioritize sparring with his political opponents and railing against quality-of-life issues on social media over laying out detailed policy plans for voters.
But Trump’s formula for politicking, while radical, has been successful for him. And whether Pratt is intentionally following that formula or not, his celebrity and social media savvy are giving him real momentum in the race. Several polls have him in second place behind Bass; an Emerson College poll from May 13 put him at 22%, a 12-point surge from March that leaves him eight points behind the incumbent.
And this week, his growing success drew the attention of the president.
“I’d like to see him do well,” Trump told reporters. “I heard he’s a big MAGA person.”
Pratt is a bellwether of sorts for the national Trump-era GOP. His success or failure on June 2 — or, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, in a November runoff — will test the effectiveness of running a Trump-like populist candidate in a deep-blue jurisdiction where Democratic voters are wavering on the party establishment. Democrats face a litmus test as well, with Democratic Socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman running to the left of Bass, her former mentor. Pratt seeks to position himself between them as a moderate alternative to both.
To Pratt’s supporters, he’s a “breath of fresh air” who could shake the city from the Democrats’ grip, as Roxanne Hoge, chair of the LA County GOP, put it.
“We’ve been under one-party rule,” Hoge told MS NOW. “And it has destroyed what should be paradise.”
To critics, Pratt’s mayoral campaign is more evidence of MAGA’s ineptitude. The movement’s backing of Pratt “means that they are not a serious governing party, and it means that there’s no desire to even attempt to be,” said Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
But to Pratt, all the MAGA talk is a distraction campaign mounted by his opponents.
“They say I’m MAGA to try to stop me,” Pratt told Hilton, “because my message exposes their corruption.”
Pratt’s team declined multiple interview requests from MS NOW, and did not respond to specific allegations mentioned in this story.
***
Pratt’s early days, leading up to and during his time on “The Hills,” were marked by a relentless fixation with money — amassing it however he could, and then throwing it away as soon as it arrived.
In his book, “The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain,” published in January, Pratt details the lying and hustling that brought him celebrity and wealth, and the lavish spending that followed.
Pratt grew up in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy residential enclave of about 20,000 people sandwiched between Santa Monica and Malibu. As a teenager going to school alongside celebrities, Pratt said he stole photos of his friend with Mary-Kate Olsen and sold them to Us Weekly for $50,000. (The magazine’s then-photo editor, Peter Grossman, whom Pratt said he sold the photos to, did not respond to MS NOW’s multiple requests for comment.)
Pratt’s obsession with get-rich-quick schemes only grew after he joined the cast of “The Hills” in 2007. The MTV show, which premiered the year before, chronicled the personal dramas of a group of 20-somethings trying to build careers in fashion and entertainment in LA.
Pratt quickly assumed the role of the show’s villain, over his propensity to bully other cast members, particularly women. That version of Pratt was a persona, he maintains, handcrafted by producers. The volatility of his on-camera relationship with fellow cast member — and now wife — Heidi Montag was also fake, he writes. Pratt was Montag’s bad boyfriend on the show, who fought with her family, isolated her from her friends and famously kicked her out of his car when she refused to move in with him — a scene he said producers forced them to film a dozen times, and one that he writes “still haunts me to this day.” (Several of the show’s former producers, including executive producer Adam DiVello, did not respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment.)
Fighting and breaking up proved lucrative for the couple, as did reuniting. Pratt said in 2008, he and Montag eloped to Mexico on the promise of a $400,000 paycheck from Us Weekly, all behind the backs of the show’s producers — a move they believed would make them too relevant to be fired. They staged another on-camera church wedding in LA the following year. Pratt said he considered leaving Montag at the altar if producers would offer them an extra $1 million.
The plot kept working, so they kept staging fake storylines to secure magazine deals. The whole time, Pratt writes, “the public saw chaos, betrayal, and divorce papers. But behind the scenes? Heidi and I were still thick as thieves, scheming side by side, laughing at how easy it was to keep the world guessing and the checks coming in.”
And once the money started rolling in, they blew right through it.
They amassed, in Pratt’s telling, more than $1 million worth of crystals; $500,000 worth of Hermes Birkin bags for Montag; designer suits for Pratt worth “about the same”; and $300,000 worth of guns and ammunition, purchased as they became increasingly paranoid about their safety. At one point, during the penultimate season of “The Hills,” the couple’s finances were in such dire straits that they had to move back in with his parents.
“Ever since I’d met Heidi, every dollar that came in, we’d spent right away,” Pratt writes. “That’s just how we rolled. No savings account, no backup plan, just direct deposit and vibes. Because what’s money, really? Just energy moving in and out of your life.”
Pratt’s laissez-faire approach to spending doesn’t seem to raise red flags with his local political supporters. Ariana Assenmacher, vice president of political engagement for the LA County Young Republicans, told MS NOW she sees Pratt’s admissions as proof he is “willing to admit his mistakes, and hopefully learn from them.”
She added that she has faith the city government’s “checks and balances” — including a Democrat-run city council — would help control his spending.
But some Angelenos who were on the fence about voting for Pratt told MS NOW that his financial admissions didn’t inspire confidence in his ability to manage the city’s $14 billion budget.
“Would that make me apprehensive to vote for him? Absolutely,” said Rob Jernigan, a Palisades resident and fire recovery activist, in March after hearing passages from the book read by MS NOW.
By May, though, Jernigan said he was resigned to voting for Pratt. He believed his preferred pick in a crowded field of more than a dozen candidates, tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, didn’t stand a chance.
“He’s not great,” Jernigan said of Pratt. But “compared to Karen Bass and Nithya Raman,” he added, “are you kidding me?”
***
Recommended
The Palisades fire destroyed more than 6,800 structures, including both Pratt’s and his parents’ homes, and killed a dozen people in the neighborhood, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Pratt was grief-stricken in the weeks and months that followed. On social media, he posted videos of himself sifting through the rubble of his former home, where he and Montag were raising their two sons, pulling out crystals that survived the blaze.
He directed his anger at Bass and other city officials for what he described as a series of failures to prepare for and respond to the blazes. Bass was in Ghana at the time of the fires, and city officials kept a reservoir near the Palisades dry for years, despite the fact that it was intended to help mitigate a deadly fire — a fact that Newsom later called “deeply troubling.”
But Pratt has focused the majority of his attention and ire on a disproven theory surrounding the disbursement of $100 million in recovery funds raised through a pair of concerts in LA last year, organized by the Annenberg Foundation, a private family organization. In July, Pratt platformed allegations by a local blogger, who claimed the funds were being misspent by FireAid, the entity charged with disbursing them, by going to nonprofits rather than individual victims. Within days, Trump posted about it on Truth Social, alleging FireAid “LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER DEMOCRAT INSPIRED SCAM,” and Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., called for a federal investigation on the House floor. Within weeks, Pratt was in DC, having meetings at the Justice Department.
Pratt’s claims were soon undermined. Separate investigations by the Los Angeles Times and a law firm commissioned by FireAid found that while some of the money did go to nonprofits, none of the funds were misappropriated. Instead, some grants provided direct assistance to victims through cash vouchers and gift card for groceries, while others supported more long-term recovery.
But conspiracy theories have a way of outlasting the facts. Pratt has continued repeating the unsubstantiated claim that the FireAid relief effort was a “scam,” including in his book and during an interview with Joe Rogan last month, which has more than one million views. The fantastical theory left Pratt feeling, he told Rogan, like public funding “doesn’t go to solving anything or fixing it. It goes to scams.”
This isn’t the first time Pratt has dipped his toe in the conspiratorial waters, as he admits in his book.
“I come from a long line of so-called conspiracy theorists who turned out to be dead-on accurate because it’s only a conspiracy theory until it becomes breaking news,” Pratt writes. “Then, suddenly, everyone’s acting like they saw it coming all along…”
In 2009, he and Montag appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ now-moribund podcast to discuss their “recent awakening” after watching Jones’ new film, “The Obama Deception,” which claimed without evidence that former President Barack Obama had been installed as a puppet president by shadowy actors to facilitate a totalitarian regime.
“I really do feel like we took the blue pill or whatever in Matrix,” Pratt told Jones at the time. “And I feel like you really did pull that little mechanical thing out of the back of my brain.”
Pratt kept taking the Matrix pills. Among the beliefs he shared with Jones were that 9/11 was “100%” an inside job; that global warming isn’t real (“We’ve all seen footage of the polar bears swimming to new pieces of ice,” Pratt said); and that fluoridated water is a government poison (“Do you know how hard it is for me to go to the market and even find a drinking water bottle that says ‘fluoride free’?” Pratt asked).
Eight years later, the couple again joined Jones and revealed that they had gone deeper down the conspiratorial rabbit hole. They said that their belief in the “New World Order” — a sprawling Cold War-era theory alleging that global elites are behind pandemics, terrorist attacks and other crises — had tanked their Hollywood careers.
***
Pratt may be coy about his party affiliation and ties to the Trump-era GOP, but Republicans are nevertheless claiming him as one of their own.
Fox News host and former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called him a “phenomenal model” for the party’s midterm candidates on air earlier this month.
“Wake up, congressional Republicans. Become Spencer Pratt,” McEnany said the day after Pratt’s first mayoral debate.
Assenmacher, from the LA County Young Republicans, sees Pratt as “the future.”
“We want imperfect people to step up and lead us in the right direction,” she told MS NOW.
Pratt is a flawed candidate. In addition to his track record of poor money management and belief in conspiracy theories, Pratt has been caught stretching the truth during his campaign. Pratt said he lived in an Airstream trailer on his burned-out lot in the Palisades, while reports said he was actually staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, where rooms go for at least $1,500 a night. (Pratt later told TMZ, “I don’t live anywhere” — despite a viral campaign video in which he claimed to live in the trailer — and said his security team would not let him sleep in his Airstream due to death threats.)
MS NOW’s review of Pratt’s campaign finance records turned up other discrepancies. Despite Pratt’s recent claims to CBS News and in a fundraising email that he campaigns “from my heart” and without consultants or backing from billionaires, since launching his campaign in January, Pratt has spent at least $48,000 on consultants, including TAG Strategies, whose clients have included Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and the Arizona Republican Party. (Between January and mid-April, Bass spent at least $167,000 on consultants, while Raman spent at least $27,800, their most recent filings show.)
Pratt also secured donations from billionaires, including sports executive Jeanie Buss, New York hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and the Winklevoss twins, known for their ties to Facebook. Pratt out-raised both Bass and Raman between January and mid-April, taking in more than $538,000 — just over $7,000 more than Raman raised in the same period, and about $40,000 more than Bass.
Republican voters may be willing to overlook Pratt’s imperfections on the hope of gaining a substantial foothold in city government. But whether a majority of Angelenos can accept Pratt’s shortcomings is another question — especially as the city gears up to host the World Cup this July and the Olympics in 2028, all while confronting housing and homelessness crises and a crumbling entertainment industry.
Some of the city’s electorate may be starting to sour on Bass — a UCLA poll released last month shows that 40% of the electorate is undecided in the race — but some Republican strategists are skeptical those voters’ frustrations will be enough to make them pick Pratt over Raman. In the city’s last mayoral election, Bass beat her closest challenger, billionaire Rick Caruso, a Republican turned centrist Democrat, by nearly 10 points. Pratt, meanwhile, is contending with comparisons to Trump at a time when the president’s approval rating sits at a historic low.
“This is a much more difficult partisan environment than four years ago,” Madrid, the California strategist, said.
Angelenos, Madrid added, “want a change agent who’s not part of the typical Democratic Party — it doesn’t mean [they’re] going to go vote for a Republican.”
Raman and Bass seem to be hoping the same. Both highlighted Trump’s comments supporting Pratt this week, in apparent efforts to boost their own campaigns.
But just as Trump dismisses his own critics with claims that he alone can make America great again, Pratt promises he’s the only candidate who can restore LA to its “golden age.” If he doesn’t win, Pratt told CNN this week, “LA is cooked, cooked — like, done. Burnt cooked.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.