I t is the morning of Jan. 7, 2025, in the Pacific Palisades and the Santa Ana winds are blowing hot from the north. A man wakes up and begins his morning routine. He slaps on a T-shirt with his wife’s face on it and starts the espresso machine. The nanny heads out with the kids. He cues up his morning song, Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” 

The world moves on, another day another drama, drama

But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma

And then the world moves on, but one thing’s for sure

Maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours

This is all perfectly normal because we are in Los Angeles, California. The man’s next actions are even consistent with a certain West Side of L.A. ethos. The nanny runs into the house and reports there is fire in the hills. The man hikes up a trail to see for himself. He films his reactions for his TikTok. Bite-size narration clips chronicle a day that begins with inanity and ends in apocalypse.

Well, this isn’t looking good…

First time I’ve seen the flames coming over the hills… 

OK, it’s getting a little closer…

It’s all fun and games having 1,000 crystals until you’re gonna try to pack them all, because fire is coming around the corner…

Yikes. Yikes. Yikes…

We have to get out of here…

I’m watching my house burn down on our security cameras…

The man is Spencer Pratt, once voted the second-worst celebrity in American history after O.J. Simpson. In the past, Pratt lost his shit on reality shows, beginning with MTV’s The Hills. The rage was always ridiculous because the stakes were so low. My favorite freakout was when he went cuckoo in the Costa Rican jungle after a wrestler ripped off the labels of his wife’s dry shampoo bottles on the show I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!  

Now, he is losing his shit over something that matters: Mayor Karen Bass’ handling of the Palisades fires that burned down his and his parents’ houses. He has expanded his scope to the city’s homeless encampments, talking of moms pushing strollers past naked humans shitting in the streets and testing fentanyl on their dogs, leading Pratt to tweet, “I have the only endorsement I need. Moms and animal lovers who want to feel safe.”

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Pratt is a quintessential American. His entire life has been fueled by an unfathomable level of self-confidence, despite a data set that suggests he may not be good at anything. No one should have been surprised when he saw only one solution to L.A.’s problems: Elect Spencer Pratt mayor. The fact that he is being taken seriously and, I mean this with all sincerity, won a May 6 mayoral debate tells us all we need to know about L.A., California, and America in the 2020s. He has attracted the support of Porsche Cayenne moms, aging music producers, and the strangely influential L.A. contrarian liberal crowd who, to paraphrase Phil Ochs, are 10 degrees left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if they feel unsafe while walking their dog. 

Los Angeles now has a choice prophesied by Pratt decades ago on The Hills: “It’s my way or the lame way.”

Never have we ever needed to be lamer.

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WE MET PRATT ON The Hills, where he and Heidi Montag, the woman on his T-shirt, reigned as king and queen of a Los Angeles cliché that was even shallower than actual Los Angeles. You remember the highlights. Spencer gives the same flowers to two different girls. Spencer throws Heidi out of his car and peels away. Spencer and Heidi become one: Speidi. Spencer leaks rumors of a sex tape involving cast mate Lauren Conrad to the gossip blogger Perez Hilton. Conrad unleashes holy hell on Heidi who, in fairness, had a plausible alibi because she was getting both a nose job and breast augmentation when the story broke. Still, Lauren confronts Heidi with one of reality television’s immortal lines:

“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.”

Pratt wanted things both ways. He has repeatedly complained about being manipulated on The Hills and victimized by “Frankenbiting” — a reality-show editing technique where dialogue is lifted from a different conversation — into saying things he didn’t say. Alas, in The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain, his recent memoir, he brags about torquing the Pratt brand for fun and profit. Reading his memoir is a fun-house ride through his personal mythmaking. (He writes that complications during delivery led relieved doctors to lift him into the air “like Simba in The Lion King.”)  He remembers being obsessed with attention early in his life, wondering whether he still existed when people stopped looking at him. 

The young Pratt is rich and charming — his dad is a dentist — but not nearly as rich as his classmates at the ultra-posh Crossroads School in Santa Monica. He creates his first break by bluffing his way into Fonzie’s house, a.k.a. Henry Winkler, heading upstairs into his son Max’s bedroom and absconding with snaps of a then-teenaged Mary-Kate Olsen partying down like a normal high schooler. Pratt then sold the pics to the tabloid Us Weekly for $50,000. 

These character traits served him well on the rise, but then came the fall, after The Hills was canceled. And holy shit, what a fall. Speidi spent $2 million on Heidi’s debut album, Superficial. According to Pratt, it arrived in January 2010 with one significant problem: They forgot about it. After spending years and millions manufacturing Heidi into a pop star, they didn’t do any promotion. The album sold 672 copies its first week.

Montag was devastated. She whispered a question to her man-child.

“Four years and two million dollars, and we just… spaced?” 

The couple’s spending habits were pure Pompeii if the Roman city had disappeared because of deficit spending and not a volcano. Half a million dollars dropped on Birkin bags. Three-hundred thousand spent on ammunition. An attempt to buy a jungle compound using gold in a backpack ended badly. Their $75,000-a-month Malibu compound was trashed by a Judas-like security guard who stole their Japanese toilets. None of it mattered, because Pratt believed the world was about to end in a Mayan apocalypse. He theorized that an associate might have been microdosing the couple with LSD, leading Heidi to believe he was levitating one night.

And then there were the crystals. So many crystals. At first, Pratt bought them because they were beautiful. He talked of building his own “gemstone cathedral.” He knew of their healing power. One time, Heidi was in excruciating pain after undergoing a half-dozen plastic surgery procedures in a single day. She nearly died when she slipped into what Pratt describes as a Demerol overdose and later had a brutally revealing conversation with her mother.

“Sounds to me like you want to look like Barbie,” her mother said.

“I do want to look like Barbie,” Heidi answered.

Painkillers were not helping, so Pratt bought Heidi a $15,000 piece of sugilite. According to Pratt, she slept through the night for the first time afterward. Soon they were broke and living with his parents. There were other adventures. In 2009, Pratt and Heidi drifted into the Alex Jones ecosystem, calling into his show like starstruck tourists. Pratt enthusiastically rattled off his favorite Jones documentaries: Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, The Obama Deception, Masters of Terror, 9/11: The Road to Tyranny, The Matrix of Evil, and the Police State trilogy. He then mentioned that he thought climate change was nonsense.

Then Pratt grew up, in a way. In the 2010s, Speidi still did the occasional TV show, but Pratt realized that his next move was to be “real,” and for him that meant shooting feel-good social-media videos about hummingbirds, crystals, and being a daddy. The young family moved into a house in the Palisades up the hill from his childhood home. At sunrise, Pratt would stand outside in sweats, filming himself, as hummingbirds swarmed around his blond head. 

The thirst for fame never died. “I want a hit show so fucking bad,” shouts Pratt in a poignant 2022 Esquire profile. At that moment, a reboot of The Hills had been recently canceled, and Pratt was trying to get a cannabis reality show off the ground. Still, the writer recounts that Pratt dreams of a higher calling, to “create one successful reality TV format and then he can replicate it ad nauseum.”

Then the fires came.

IT ALL STARTED WITH the day-of-fire TikTok and Instagram posts. Pratt morphs before our eyes from semi-lovable L.A. doofus into a man grieving as his world turns to embers. He emerged as the voice of the affluently dispossessed in the aftermath, egged on, according to Pratt, by a TV reporter who confided he had two weeks to get his message across before the media moved on to the next disaster.

“I feel like a ghost,” Pratt said on Good Morning America as he lamented how he had lost all his family photos from the pre-iPhone age. He kept posting. His TikTok views skyrocketed. “If we were rich, I wouldn’t be on an app,” Pratt told People. “I’d be buying a new house and starting to order things.” Speidi then managed the impossible, turning the ultimate feel-bad story into a feel-good miracle. Pratt mentioned that if people wanted to help, well, Montag’s Superficial was being re-released and maybe they could download it. The album climbed to Number One on the Apple Music charts. 

But mostly there was rage. Pratt went after Bass with fury, mocking the mayor for being out of the country during the fires and for leaving the nearby Santa Ynez reservoir empty. He ripped her over fire resources, claiming he called the LAFD and asked for one truck to be sent to his neighborhood but was told none were available. 

Spencer Pratt was no longer a celeb fire victim, but Joe Taxpayer — OK, with 2 million Instagram followers — let down by a dysfunctional government. His anger was no longer about dry-shampoo labels, but families displaced and neighborhoods erased. Spencer Pratt from The Hills was gone and replaced by righteously pissed-off Spencer Pratt starring in a reboot of 1993’s Falling Down, a cinematic account of a frustrated white man in an earlier L.A. dystopia.

Pratt expanded his targets. Shortly after the fire, a star-studded assortment of musicians ranging from Billie Eilish to Stevie Nicks performed two FireAid concerts that raised $100 million for victims. It quickly became a Republican talking point that the money had disappeared into a mysterious tangle of NGOs, long a villainous concept in Trumpian circles.

“Let me tell you my first experience with NGOs,” Pratt told the All-In podcast. “After the Palisades fire, FireAid, $100 million raised. Every single person I talked to is messaging me, ‘No one’s getting this money. No one’s seeing a dollar.’”

The fact that FireAid funneled money to reputable charities and food banks was lost in the wash. Still, it became part of Pratt’s populist rhetoric. No one in government or associated with government can be trusted, everyone is on the take. He centered on L.A.’s homeless crisis. He describes the unfortunate as “zombies” in the perfectly pitched anger of an Angeleno just trying to get through the day.

“It can’t even be called Skid Row anymore. It’s called Los Angeles,” Pratt told Joe Rogan. “Before my house burned down in the Palisades, my wife was ready to move, because every morning in front of Palisades Elementary there was a lady cleaning her private parts in front of kids at 7:45 in the morning. … She’d go around the corner, and she’d go number two in front of Joe’s Barber Shop.” 

(Earlier, I said Pratt’s life experiences suggested he wasn’t good at anything. I misspoke. His entire life has made him fluent in soundbite outrage.)

On the first anniversary of the Palisades fire, Pratt still wore the traditional colors of the villain, sporting a black cap that read “Let Us Burn,” sunglasses, and a black T-shirt as he spoke to an estimated crowd of 1,000 people just off Sunset Boulevard in the Palisades.

“I’m here today to remember the one-year anniversary of the worst day of my life,” said Pratt in an unsteady voice. “On January 7, 2025, Heidi and I lost our home. We lost every material possession we owned. My parents lost their home, too, and with it decades of memories made inside those walls.”

His voice broke and he shook his hands violently to keep it together. For a few minutes, he sounded less like a reality-television character and more like a man who had watched his hometown die in real time. 

“I used to think my taxpayer dollars funded a functional city,” Pratt said. “But I was completely naive.” 

Pratt mentioned that all he had been doing for the past year was gorging on burritos and searching for who was responsible. But he couldn’t stick to the truth for the full six minutes. 

He blamed “DEI” for failures in firefighting tactics. No evidence. He claimed, again, that NGOs, nonprofits, and unions were “running this town” and alleged that “100 million in fire-aid money is missing.” No evidence. He suggested that park ranger incompetence caused the disaster. No evidence. His cap literally suggested Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom let the city burn on purpose. No evidence.  

Knock twice if you’ve heard this one before.

AT FIRST, SPENCER PRATT’S campaign sounded like something you read about in the trades, a fading star scores a pilot that is ultimately not picked up for a 13-episode series order. Then everyone realized that Karen Bass was running for re-election.  

Cities fail all the time during disasters, but Bass’ problem was that afterward she often appeared more focused on shifting blame than assuming responsibility. I know many Angelenos who see Bass’ belief that her fire performance entitled her to a second term as, well, insane. Sure, there were a half-dozen candidates, some smart and well-intentioned, but Bass has always been the frontrunner, scooping up labor support and endorsements. 

Her only viable opponent seemed to be L.A. council member Nithyah Raman, a progressive good-government type who had been elected in 2020 after a relentless door-to-door campaign with a platform that stressed getting L.A.’s homeless crisis under control. Alas, Raman’s squeaky-clean image took a hit in February when, two weeks after endorsing Bass for re-election, she announced her own candidacy on deadline day.

Pratt was polling in third, so he qualified along with Bass and Raman for a May 6 televised debate at the Skirball Center. The conventional wisdom was that Pratt would fall on his face, his soul disappearing in a cloud of policy gibberish. It did not happen. Apparently, the world forgot that Pratt has been choreographing seemingly spontaneous zingers for two decades.

The debate started with Bass passing the blame for the city’s flawed fire response onto Fire Chief Kristin Crowley sending 1,000 firefighters home early that day. Not exactly Harry Truman saying the buck stops here. The mayor said planes couldn’t do water drops because the gusting winds made the situation unsafe. Most experts agree with her, but that didn’t stop Pratt. He disputed her wind claims.

“She’s an incredible liar. Everyone on their phones, Google it.”

Pratt’s jibe was pure Trump. It was factually inaccurate but seemed emotionally true, a phrase that described Pratt’s entire performance. While Bass and Raman argued over the efficacy of needle-exchange programs, Pratt got to the point.

“No needles and pipes for drug addicts on the street. Ever.”

Raman is a smart policy wonk. Unfortunately, she believed an L.A. televised debate in 2026 with a reality star was going to be Lincoln-Douglas. She watched with amazement as the moderator thanked Pratt for “directing traffic” after he suggested Bass had not been heard on an issue. Raman lost her cool. In the June primary, a candidate only wins if they score over 50 percent of the vote, otherwise there is a November runoff between the top two candidates. She suggested there were shenanigans occurring.

“I want to just say to everybody who’s watching today, you’re going to watch today as Mayor Bass and Spencer Pratt attacked me because they want to run against each other in the general election. Each of them thinks that running against each other is what’s going to help them win…”

This was a plausible theory, but it set up Pratt for the kill shot.

“Mayor Bass and I are definitely not working together,” said Pratt with anger. He motioned toward the mayor. “I blame this person for burning my house and my parents’ house and my town and all my neighbors down. I am not working with Mayor Bass.”

Pratt dodged and weaved when pressed to give specific policy proposals. The moderator asked Pratt how he would manage the city’s $14 billion budget. Left unsaid was the implication that Pratt has shown less success holding on to a dollar. 

He responded the right way. He lied his ass off.

“Well, thankfully, I have common sense and I am humble,” said Pratt. “I have humility. I’m going to surround myself with the smartest people in the world. … My job is to be, as crazy as this will sound, I’m the adult in the room here.”

The debate ended a few minutes later with Bass and Raman learning something that Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz learned in 2016: Never debate a bullshit artist.

ADMITTEDLY, THE BULLSHIT artist makes great ads. Pratt has a banger where he speaks to camera outside the palatial homes of Bass and Raman. (Bass’ is the official mayoral residency).

“This is where Mayor Bass lives,” says Pratt in a suit without a tie. “You notice something? Or here, where Nithya Raman’s $3 million mansion sits?”

The video cuts to dystopian scenes of homeless encampments and desolate streets. 

“They don’t have to live in the mess they created where you live.”

Now we are back in the Palisades. Pratt stands outside a silver trailer on his burned-out property.

“This is where I live. They let my home burn down. I know what the consequences of failed leadership are. That’s why I’m running for mayor, for my sons and the rest of us Angelenos that want to stop these corrupt politicians from destroying our city. We are going to get the golden age of Los Angeles back.”

A follow-up ad features the Pratt family returning to the trailer for the first time (a camera crew is coincidentally present). Heidi cries, a son finds his favorite shovel in the rubble while Spencer comforts them. Sure, the ads are overwrought and some of their power is diffused by the fact that someone has spray-painted in all caps “Heidiland” behind the trailer, but the pain is so visceral that it twists even a cynic’s heart into a knot.

Conveniently, Pratt’s ad blitz has been paired with theoretically unsanctioned AI ads that present Pratt as Batman dropping into the city where he has a quick conversation with Joe Rogan (?!) before he beats up ICE agents — wait, no, they are DSA terrorists who are just dressed like ICE agents. Pratt cleans up the streets that somehow are in L.A. but also feature Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill looming behind them. 

This is the most palatable of Pratt’s online ads that his campaign did not create, but that Pratt reposts. Another AI spot features Bass as the Joker, Kamala Harris swigging vodka, and Gavin Newsom saying he can’t help the desperate Cali mom straight out of a Bikram yoga ad, but if she was transgender and an immigrant, he could get her a “free pussy.” 

The two ad campaigns show the duality of the Pratt machine. Over here, he is a simple man who has lost everything. Over there, he is the righteous asshole calling Karen Bass Karen Basura in a cartoonish Spanish accent (“basura” is Spanish for trash).

But this is a Spencer Pratt production, so the good times could not last. The media stopped treating him as a harmless nut and victim and more like an actual candidate. The Alex Jones conversation resurfaced. The fact that he is a registered Republican who voted for Trump resurfaced, an admission that is less popular in L.A. than commuting from Westwood to Eagle Rock on a Friday afternoon. 

Then a trusted ally turned on him. In his memoir, Pratt recounts receiving a call from a media major domo when Speidi was contemplating leaving the Costa Rican jungle after the dry-shampoo incident.

“Spencer, this is AMAZING! You need to get back on that fucking show, ASAP! … You’re trending worldwide! This is massive!” 

“But we have to poop in a hole.” 

“Who cares? GET BACK IN THE JUNGLE!” Do you hear me? Go back in there and lose your goddamn minds.”

The man was TMZ head Harvey Levin. Their cozy historical relationship made Levin’s next move diabolically brutal. After the fire, Speidi and kids had relocated to his parents’ place in Santa Barbara, leading some reporters to ask if Pratt was still a Los Angeles citizen and eligible to run for mayor. Pratt answered by ingeniously moving the Airstream trailer onto his property. Pratt suggested — nay, said — in his ads that he was living in the trailer. 

Cue the deluge. Levin and TMZ reported after the debate that Pratt and family were living in the thousand-bucks-a-night Hotel Bel-Air. (It was not clear who was paying for the hotel.) Pratt angrily responded in a follow-up interview with TMZ. Some excerpts:

“That is where I live, period. I don’t need to sleep there every night. I don’t need to go number two on that toilet.”

Besides, Pratt maintained, his life was in danger from unnamed forces that would stop at nothing to end his campaign

“I’m at a hotel because these psychopaths are messaging me every day, they’re going to kill me. … You can literally snipe me.”

Pratt seemed on the verge of a stroke as he unpersuasively argued that saying “I live here” in an ad didn’t mean he actually lived there. 

Then Spencer did a very Spencer thing. His campaign cut an ad spoofing himself as the new “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” to the tune of the show’s theme song.

“In West Los Angeles, Palisades, in my backyard is where I spent most of my days,” Pratt raps. “Feeding humming birds, relaxing all cool, avoiding all the bums outside of the school / When a couple politicians, who were up to no good, started making trouble in my neighborhood / I got in one little fire and my mom got scared, and she said you are moving in with Harvey Levin in Bel Air.”

Everyone laughed. Spencer Pratt was forgiven. Again.

TMZ — apparently the Woodward and Bernstein of this campaign — has also reported that Pratt has signed a deal to film a reality show if he is elected mayor (Pratt denies this). 

The hit show that Pratt wants so “fucking bad” could be one election victory away. 

I’m sure 24/7 cameras would not impact how he runs the city at all.

I NO LONGER LIVE in Los Angeles, but it is the city I love the most. I returned to cover the fires and wept for friends and sources who lost everything. The same friends protested ICE last summer, getting tear gassed for their troubles. They tell me that Spencer Pratt can’t win. (A recent poll shows Pratt passing Raman and polling at 22 percent, but trailing Bass by 14 points in a head-to-head race.) They say his message is all doomsday babble. OK, Pratt did mention on the All-In podcast that he has a billionaire supporter willing to donate $500 million to be the “fun czar” and help ramp up L.A.’s entertainment scene. You will not be shocked to learn Pratt said the donor’s name could not be released. 

My friends say Trump’s remarks about Pratt — “I’d like to see him do well. … I heard he’s a big MAGA person” — will not help his cause. And, besides, what is this “Golden Age” that Pratt keeps talking about? Rodney King? The Watts riots? L.A. has always been a magical, surreal, and completely fucked-up place. 

Thankfully, there is a safety net. Los Angeles has a weak-mayor system where Pratt would have little power to make unilateral decisions even if he was elected. Los Angeles County is geographically larger than Delaware and the County Board of Supervisors controls much of the area’s budget. Much of the rest is controlled by Democrats in Sacramento.

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Still, the fact that the city is even having this conversation is depressing. L.A. finds itself in a local spinoff of our nation’s endless reality show: Choose between an erratic shit-stirrer and an apparatchik more likely to make beep-bop-boop robot noises than show authentic empathy.

Unfortunately, nobody seems able to change the channel.