Spencer Pratt: Hollywood troll His mayoral campaign spurns the old Tinseltown elite

Spencer Pratt first appeared on reality television in 2005, when the precocious 20-year-old executive producer stepped out from behind the cameras of The Princes of Malibu to become a permanent house guest at the Malibu mansion owned by the grey-haired music producer David Foster (and stepfather of the eponymous “princes”) — thereby enraging the show’s old-guard authority figure. It quickly became clear that the young upstart was quite literally running the show.

A few years later, Pratt found himself in front of the cameras again, this time for MTV’s docu-soap, The Hills. He eloped to Cabo San Lucas with his inamorata, the rat-tail and scorpion ingesting Heidi Montag, she of the 10 cosmetic surgeries, who was soon to grace the cover of Playboy magazine. In 2009, Pratt shifted gears to music, cutting an album and proclaiming he was the “White Jay-Z”. The following year he was arrested in Costa Rica for boarding an airplane with weapons. In Los Angeles, this is the resume — sordid sex-tape scandals and all — that qualifies Spencer Pratt to run for mayor.

The comedians aren’t amused. Late-night Trumpo-phobe Jimmy Kimmel derided him as a crystal-hawking huckster. Drew Carey, the man-of-the-people game-show host, condemned him as a “serial scammer”. Chelsea Handler took a moment off from smutty anecdotes to ask on Instagram: “Have we learned anything yet?” They were among the Hollywood liberals who have ridiculed and demonised Pratt as a showboat, a loudmouth, a clown, and a troll. And yet — to reduce the overriding frustrations of our piteous political moment to three words — no one cares.

The latest UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll has Pratt at 22%, only four percentage points behind incumbent Karen Bass and three behind activist city council member Nithya Raman. The latest from the California Post placed Pratt at 30.1% and the incumbent at 29.5% — a statistical tie. Of course, it doesn’t really matter who wins today’s non-partisan primary (Pratt is a registered Republican), as it has become clear that Bass will not swing enough votes to gather a majority, thus guaranteeing a run-off in November.

The point here is not to decry the degraded state of American politics. Railing against reality television politics is so twenty-teen. These days, not a single eyebrow raises when plaid-flannelled Luke Gulbranson — known for his clueless romantic pursuits on Bravo’s Summer House — runs for a Congressional seat in Minnesota, or when “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham seeks a spot on Austin’s City Council. Just look at the guy with the nuclear codes. 

It’s hardly a revelation that politics has gone Hollywood. The interesting point here is that the liberal Hollywood elite, the longstanding behemoth of left-coast, Left-wing electioneering, has been powerless to stop it. The rattling last gasp of LA’s political establishment came in 2024, when Oprah and Julia Louis-Dreyfus led the cavalry for Kamala Harris, whooping and waving proverbial swords over their heads so that George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Jamie Lee Curtis would know which way to charge — to no avail.

Pratt delivers a new brand of politics — call it alt-Hollywood, as his coalition includes none of the previous power brokers of Tinseltown’s establishment. Of course he has his billionaire, the hedge-fund tycoon Daniel Loeb, who once purchased a massive stake in Sony Pictures. And he can boast a bona-fide Academy-Award winner in Brian Grazer, a longstanding backer of California Democrats (including Kamala). Then come the West Coast MAGAs one might expect: Dennis Quaid and James Woods. But from there on out, his industry backers look different from anything we have seen in the past. He has energised hordes of Hollywood himbos and bimbos, awakening the political consciousness of actresses/models like Amber Rose and Paris Hilton, fellow reality stars Brody Jenner and Kristin Cavallari, Real Housewife of Miami‘s Joanna Krupa, and Dancing with the Stars’ Audrina Patridge. Pratt’s long tail reaches far into the D-List, from Billy Bush to Bachelorette runner-up Nick Viall to the perpetually online blabberati of comedians, DJs and former UFC fighters.

In a viral video of the fundraiser held at the Brentwood home of Pratt’s erstwhile foil on Princes of Malibu, David Foster’s wife Katharine McPhee belted out a version of “Simply the Best” — with new (and cringe) lyrics featuring Pratt. “La la land is ready for a plot twist,” concluded Access Hollywood. 

In Hollywood, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, a plot twist is generally accompanied by what is technically known as a “recognition” — a perception that what was once is no more, a new awareness that changes everything. The recognition that may well define Pratt’s political future is the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. This became evident on Fox News‘s hard-Right comedy hour Gutfeld!. “He’s on a mission to defeat the coastal elite,” declared the arch-conservative stalwart and eponymous host, Greg Gutfeld. “You’re on a roll. You’re surging in the polls.”

Pratt ignored the statement and repeated his campaign promise to be the “look around” candidate — apparently the only mayoral candidate in Los Angeles who will “look around” and see the “naked drug addict zombies with machetes” who plague his native city, leaving a trail of steaming excrement on sidewalks from Sherman Oaks to Silver Lake.

“You have celebrities that are now coming out in support of you,” Gutfeld pressed on. He named two of them: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx.

“I actually don’t want celebrities to come out and endorse me,” countered Pratt. (This, from the man who won “Snapchatter of the Year” at the 2018 Shorty Awards.) “I love when the celebrities attack me.” All of which makes it clear that Pratt fully comprehends the moment he is so thoroughly exploiting: the twilight of Hollywood’s liberal elite.

Pratt himself provides a perfect example of the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. He grew up in the tony enclave of the Pacific Palisades, part of California’s 32nd congressional district where Hillary Clinton notched 70% of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. He attended the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where he imbibed a socially mindful “Human Development” curriculum in which maths and science were subordinated to social justice, environmental issues, and “Modern Gender Studies”. At Crossroads, Pratt’s classmates included numerous progeny of the entertainment aristocracy, among them Dave Chernin (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Peter Chernin) and Max Winkler (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Henry Winkler). Pratt thus had the privilege of witnessing first-hand the great tradition of Left-wing Hollywood groupthink, and learned its lessons well. Perhaps too well, as he has co-opted its ethos and language for himself, incessantly emphasising personal victimhood, namely, his post-Palisades homelessness and subsequent neglect at the hands of the political establishment. Of course, Pratt isn’t suffering too terribly, holed up for the duration in the Bel Air Hotel. That said, he has tapped into vast veins of resentment among LA’s Democratic base — the poor, the non-celebrity, and the Porsche Cayenne moms.

Pratt can get away with a campaign ironically fuelled by discourse long-ago perfected by Hollywood liberals: because he knows that the species is going extinct, and thus cannot wield much in the way of meaningful response. He knows that the power and glory that once defined the Hollywood liberal establishment is a thing of the past.

There may be room for some pathos here. I recognise the loss, as my own father was an OG champion of the rights of the poor, suffering, ink-stained proletariat toiling in the writers’ rooms of Paramount and MGM. He plotted one Writers Guild of America West strike after another as he tooled from his Neutra house in the hills to studio commissaries in his white Lincoln convertible — followed, in chronological order, by a silver gull-winged Mercedes, a black Porsche, a bronze Bentley, a biscuit Jaguar, and in a fitting finale for an octogenarian Marxist, a black Cadillac.

Throughout his half-century career as a director and screenwriter, the project closest to my father’s heart was a film Spencer Pratt would surely hold up as an example of the most absurd of all bleeding-heart fantasies. This was the 1962 release of Convicts 4, a biopic loosely based on the story of John Resko, an impoverished and unemployed unfortunate who robbed a convenience store on Christmas Eve and inadvertently shot and killed the shopkeeper. The rest of the show concerns Resko’s life in prison, where among a madcap crew of ne’er-do-wells he learns how to paint, and as a result is at long last reprieved — redeemed by the power of art. At that point in Hollywood’s ancient history, such a scenario could attract a rat pack’s worth of stars, among them Ben Gazzara, Sammy Davis Jr., Vincent Price, and Rod Steiger. Yet today, almost everyone in the industry would rather get the bums off the street than waste taxpayer dollars on paint and canvas to rehabilitate them. 

Almost everyone, that is, except the “Communist and Socialist” — who are, in the world according to Pratt, “the only people that don’t love me”.

From his earliest days in reality TV, Pratt has understood that the fast track to success was to wage war against a fake foe like David Foster. In politics, he has created a similar kind of illusory enemy out of Hollywood’s liberal establishment. No matter that it’s dead and gone. Its ghost will do. As every executive producer knows, there’s nothing quite as terrifying as a ghost. 

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