“It’s not so much that they love Donald Trump, but they don’t mind a healthy dose of Trumpism,” Morgan explains. “It particularly breaks down on the woke stuff. They may not be natural conservatives on conservative issues like guns or abortion or things like that, but they are very much with the conservative right on all the woke insanity.”
“There were a lot of people who felt uncomfortable having to walk on eggshells everywhere they went,” says CJ Pearson, a prominent conservative activist and Trump campaign adviser who lived in Los Angeles during the Biden administration.
The rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who, before morphing himself into a Trump booster, was a Brentwood-dwelling Democrat—also played a role: “When you think about where the seeds of MAHA were planted, it was in Los Angeles,” Pearson says. “This is the home of Erewhon and no seed oils—before that was cool.”
Pratt followed a similar arc to many of those seduced by the MAHA movement. He says he was apolitical for most of his life but was radicalized in the wake of the Palisades wildfires that destroyed the home he shared with his wife, Heidi Montag, and their two children. He started to speak out relentlessly on social media against Democrats like Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom, whom he blamed for the devastation of the fires.
The Celebrity Big Brother UK alum is cautious about expressing support for Trump, and Bass has used past statements that he would work with the president against him. When I prod for his views on the president, he’s reluctant. To a point.
“With Iran,” Pratt says, “Persian ladies pulled up on me and they said, ‘We love you so much. Thank you for supporting us.’” The war, he says, “definitely helped my situation in LA,” because “everyone I’ve known has hated this Allah-toya [sic], whatever the fuck, all these years, so no spilled milk here. So yes, if we’re going to go have a war, that definitely helped just get me elected, because Karen Bass was over here acting like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry we did this,’ where the real ones in LA are like, ‘Thank God.’”
