Jimmy Kimmel and Spencer Pratt JC Olivera/Getty Images; Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images Logo text Spencer Pratt will probably be thrilled: The would-be L.A. mayor has finally drawn the ire of Jimmy Kimmel.
The ABC late-night host targeted the former reality TV star turned political candidate in his Wednesday night Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue.
Kimmel laid into Pratt for his lack of leadership experience amid his face-off against incumbent Karen Bass and City Council member Nithya Raman. Yet Kimmel started off, surprisingly enough, by fully agreeing with several of Pratt’s criticisms of Los Angeles and the city’s current leadership.
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“Let’s be honest, this city is a mess,” Kimmel said. “That became obvious during the [Pacific Palisades] fires. But the people running this city, when you say, ‘This city is a mess,’ they go, ‘No, actually, it isn’t and we’re doing a lot.’ And we look around and go, ‘I’m not seeing it.’ Then they go, ‘Oh, it’s there, things are looking up.’ And this makes people who live here upset, especially people whose homes and neighborhoods burned down, who are trying to run businesses with people who need help sleeping in front of the door of their restaurant because they have nowhere else to go. They’re frustrated because nothing seems to change.”
“So then you get a guy … whose profession is to be the screaming jerk on reality shows and his house burns down,” Kimmel continues. “So even though he had no private insurance on his house and doesn’t believe in climate change, he is understandably upset about his house burning down. And because he’s a moderately famous person he gets attention … for the first time in his life, people are agreeing with what he has to say. It’s hard not to agree with what he has to say. He’s angry about the same problems a lot of people here are angry about. Does he have solutions to those problems? No.”
Pratt would probably disagree with that one, having made campaign promises about boosting fire response resources and detailing a (divisive) plan for combating homelessness in a nine-minute video.
“So then this reality star who grew up wealthy and popular who is not very wealthy and popular anymore starts to enjoy the attention and thinks, ‘You know, I should be mayor’ — which is a statement that should make everyone laugh,” Kimmel continued. “Not everyone sees this as a joke…He’s living in Hotel Bel-Air at the same time he’s making a video saying he lives in a trailer on the burned out lot where his house was … yet, still, there’s a group of people, many of which believe themselves to be liberals, who are so angry they’re willing to overlook this. You think this guy wants to be sitting in City Council meetings all day talking about zoning? No. He wants to be a star again. And guess what? It’s working.”
“This is exactly what Donald Trump did,” Kimmel said. “I know this for a fact: Donald Trump ran for president because his TV show was going to get canceled and he wanted to be relevant again. The difference between Donald Trump and this guy is Donald Trump actually had a job before he was president. He wasn’t good at the job. He got all his money from his dad. The only thing he was good at was promoting himself. And it turned out that was enough.”
Are we really going to risk repeating that mistake we made with Trump — in L.A., of all places?” Kimmel asked. “Mayor should not be your first job. The mayor of L.A. is in charge of a $14 billion annual budget. Spencer Pratt is not the person who should be in charge of that … If you don’t want to vote for Karen Bass on June 2, I get it, but you better find somebody else to vote for, and preferably somebody who isn’t wasting our time and money to get himself back on television.”
Pratt responded to the monologue on social media: “Jimmy’s secretly voting for me.”
According to a new UC Berkeley-L.A. Times poll, all three candidates are locked in a very tight race: Bass at 26 percent, Raman at 25 percent and Pratt at 22 percent among likely voters, with 10 percent undecided. Raman and Pratt have both surged by eight percentage points since March. The election will be held June 2 and the two candidates with the most votes will progress to a runoff.
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