MS NOW reporter Jacob Soboroff hit on a striking comparison between the rhetoric of Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt and that of President Donald Trump.
Soboroff told host Rachel Maddow that Pratt’s motivation to run for office was primarily the loss of his home in the devastating 2025 Palisades Fire. However, Soboroff likened the former reality TV star’s rhetoric on the issue of homelessness to that of Trump’s rhetoric on immigration.
“Spencer Pratt talks about unhoused people and the affordability crisis in Los Angeles, but the way he speaks about unhoused people here in L.A. is just like Donald Trump talks about immigrants in the United States of America,” Soboroff said. “That he wants to round them up and put them into a ‘campus-like facility’ in partnership with the federal government.”
Soboroff added that while Pratt may have many boisterous ideas about how to run the U.S.’s second-largest city, his solutions “sound a lot more like the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”
Pratt, who has never been elected to any public office and gained notoriety on the MTV reality show “The Hills,” has made the issue of homelessness a central part of his campaign strategy. Yet, he has released few detailed policy plans compared to his fellow candidates.
What he has said about the more than 43,000 unhoused people in Los Angeles seemingly paints them all with a broad brush, claiming the city “doesn’t have a homelessness problem,” but a drug problem.
“Mayor [Karen] Bass and Councilwoman [Nithya] Raman, they think empty beds, they think it’s a housing problem. It’s a drug addiction problem,” Pratt said on CNN’s “The Lead” last week. “Of course, we need to house and find shelter and rehabs for these people, but we need to have mandatory treatment for people that are on drugs.”
Pratt told “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Llamas last week that he wants to get private funding from billionaires to build a “campus” on federal land to confine unhoused drug addicts.
“I went to Washington with all the people that build the prefabricated homes. It’s actually cheaper to build an entire city of prefabricated homes with treatment facilities and medical [centers] than just launder money into buildings in L.A.,” Pratt said. “I have plenty of very successful philanthropic billionaires that I’ve met with that would love to invest in this.”
Trump threw his support behind Pratt weeks before California’s primary election, telling reporters he’d “like to see him do well.”
“He’s a character … I heard he’s a big MAGA person. He’s doing well,” Trump added.
As of Wednesday evening, Pratt holds the second-place position in the mayoral primary behind incumbent Mayor Karen Bass with 62% of the vote counted, according to The Associated Press. Los Angeles city councilwoman Nithya Raman trails Pratt and Bass in third. The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election in November if no candidate receives 50%.