On Wednesday, TMZ published a story that was meant to be the gotcha of all gotchas.

It reported that Spencer Pratt, the insurgent candidate in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, does not currently live in the Airstream trailer he showed off in a now-viral ad that captured the public’s attention.

Instead, he’s resting his bones in the swanky Hotel Bel-Air.

“Spencer Pratt has gained traction in his campaign for LA Mayor by showing what he says Karen Bass did to his family — forcing them to live in a trailer after his home burned down,” read the TMZ tweet teasing the piece.

In the ad, Pratt stood in front of the large, pristine houses of incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Councilwoman Nithya Raman, and then appeared in front of his digs: a trailer that sits on a Palisades dirt lot. It’s the dusty property where his home once stood before it was reduced to rubble in the 2025 fires.

“I live here. They let my home burn down,” he said. The contrast was incredibly effective.

After the story was published, prominent figures on the left took to X, essentially calling him corrupt and dishonest.

But did anyone who watched that clever ad really think the married father of two was actually living in the trailer? In another video, he gave a quick “house” tour of the sparkling new pad, but he might as well have been a model on “The Price Is Right” showing off the big Showcase Showdown prize.

There was no evidence of life in the tiny dwelling, not even a coffee cup.

However, the trailer itself was a symbol of his new post-fire life and his forced transience, the same tragic status thrust upon 200,000 Los Angeles residents, two-thirds of whom were still displaced earlier this month.

The fact remains that his home burned down. His parents’ home burned down. And the fact that Los Angeles was likely to re-elect Bass, who presided over the catastrophe from Ghana, burned the former “The Hills” star so much that he launched his own longshot bid to prevent her from securing a second term.

Pratt said he’s staying at the Bel-Air because he’s been getting death threats and the hotel has “its own armed security [and] that has become the only option.”

“The reality is the Bassholes and Ramaniacs are a little bit wacko, and since I destroyed them in the debate, and am surging in the polls, they are getting increasingly desperate and hostile,” he told TMZ of his rivals’ supporters.

This guy has been in the public eye for two decades acting like the s—t stirrer of the century, and that’s all they have on him? A story about him staying in a nice hotel?

Any attacks on where fire victims reside will always fall flat with normal folks, who witnessed how government incompetence turned whole swaths of the city into a ready-made set for a “Mad Max” sequel.

Despite many on the left dismissing him as a MAGA mini-Trump, Pratt isn’t an ideological person. Nor is he proposing anything radical. He simply wants to enforce the laws already on the books. He wants to empower law enforcement and disempower the homeless industrial complex that continues to throw money at an ever-festering problem.

Every time Pratt suggests implementing common-sense measures, or even points to a filthy homeless encampment, the political establishment goes absolutely batty.

It’s almost like they hold these clusters of urban squalor as sacred spaces. To be fair, their progressive policies did indeed help build them.

The truth is, Pratt is very effective at pointing out the dysfunction and disorder ruling and ruining the city.

They’re going after him because he exposed their ineptitude, and during the mayoral debate, he made mincemeat of both Raman and Bass by simply speaking like a real person.

True to Pratt’s bombastic nature, he came out swinging against TMZ, noting that the hotel, the trailer and the home in Santa Barbara where his wife and kids live are all “temporary.”

But the damage he is doing to the political class is looking rather permanent.

They need to get rid of him because he keeps exposing how poor they are at doing even the basic parts of the job. The more he talks, the worse they look.

And while pundits say he has no shot, these amped-up attacks say the powers that be are nervous.

That’s a good thing.