“Do you want that endorsement?”
Brian Kilmeade asked that out loud Tuesday morning on Fox & Friends, laughing before the question even finished leaving his mouth. Nobody on the curvy couch had an answer. Nobody needed one.
Two politicians, both underwater with voters, both carrying enough baggage to ground a cargo plane. One decides to publicly link herself to the other.
And somewhere in Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt is probably smiling.
The Endorsement Nobody Asked For
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, now living in an $8.15 million Malibu estate, officially threw her support behind embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for the June 2 mayoral election. Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt broke the news Tuesday morning, reading Harris’s glowing statement aloud before Kilmeade could stop laughing long enough to respond.
Harris declared in her statement that Bass had done “what so many said couldn’t be done — the first ever two-year decline in homelessness, reducing crime to levels this city hasn’t seen since the 1960s, and refusing to back down when the federal government came after our neighbors.”
Kilmeade cut right in. “You mean illegal immigrants, crack down, and refused to let cops work with ICE, causing riot after riot?” he fired back, per Fox News.
That’s the part of the statement the Harris cabal doesn’t want voters dwelling on. “Refusing to back down when the federal government came after our neighbors” is a polished way of saying Bass spent considerable energy shielding illegal aliens from immigration enforcement while her own constituents were watching their neighborhoods burn.
A Mayor Who Wasn’t There When It Mattered
Bass was in Ghana when the Palisades Fire broke out on January 7, 2025. She had departed for the inauguration of Ghana’s new president on January 4 — one day after the National Weather Service issued a fire weather watch for Los Angeles, according to CBS News.
By the time the fire erupted, Bass was photographed at a reception hosted by the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, roughly an hour and a half after the blaze had already started. She didn’t land back in Los Angeles until January 8 — by which point more than 1,000 structures had burned, and over 70,000 people were under evacuation orders, as CBS News reported.
Bass later admitted the trip was a mistake. “Obviously, I hated the fact that I was out of the city when the city needed me the most,” she told ABC7 Los Angeles. But admitting a mistake and facing accountability for it are two different things, and Bass has been dodging the second part ever since.
The Deseret News reported the disaster led to 29 deaths and more than $25 billion in property damage. The Palisades Fire alone burned more than 23,000 acres and destroyed nearly 6,800 structures, making it the most destructive wildfire in the history of the city of Los Angeles, per the Washington Times. And according to Fox News, 12 of those scheduled, high-priority fire flow and water storage projects in the Palisades weren’t finished before January 2025. Twenty percent of the hydrants in the area failed during firefighting efforts.
Bass also cut the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget by $17.8 million before the fire. In a December 2024 memo, LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley warned the cuts had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires,” as reported by NBC News.
Yahoo News reported that Bass faced criticism on charges that her administration watered down an internal report on the Palisades fire response by allegedly softening criticisms of LAFD failures to avoid legal liability.
Pratt Isn’t Laughing It Off
Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV personality turned mayoral candidate, lost his Pacific Palisades home — valued at approximately $3.8 million before the fire — along with his parents’ home in the blaze, according to the Washington Times. He watched neighbors die across the street from his childhood home. And he declared his candidacy on the one-year anniversary of the fire at a “They Let Us Burn!” rally near the ruins of his house.
“I never wanted to be mayor,” Pratt said on Fox & Friends. “I want to be back in my house with my family, going down to the local public schools and having just a normal life.”
But Bass accused him of “exploiting the grief” of fire victims, saying she found it “reprehensible” and suggesting he was only in the race to revive his celebrity, according to the Washington Times. Pratt didn’t let that stand for one second.
“I’m not sure if Karen Bass forgot she let my house burn down and my parents’ house burn down and I had actual neighbors burn alive across the street from my childhood home,” he fired back on Fox News’ The Will Cain Show. “The only grief is my grief, my community’s grief that I initially started this fight on behalf of.”
His campaign ad went viral with more than 10 million views on X, showing him standing outside Bass’s home and a rival candidate’s $3 million mansion before cutting to the Airstream trailer where he’s been living on his fire-ravaged lot. Hard to call that exploitation when the man is literally living in a trailer on the ashes of his own property.
But here’s the thing that complicates the picture a little — Harris’s statement did point to real data. Yahoo News reported a 19% drop in homicides in Los Angeles in 2025 compared to 2024, with LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell noting the number of homicides in 2025 was the lowest since 1966. Crime numbers don’t lie, even when the politician claiming credit for them does. Whether Bass deserves any of that credit is a separate argument, and not one that gets resolved cleanly.
Two Losers, One Kiss of Death
Polls show Bass with less than the 50 percent support needed to avoid a runoff, with a large portion of the electorate still undecided, per Newsweek. Harris carried Los Angeles County with about 65 percent of the vote in the 2024 presidential race, which tells you something about the city’s political tilt — and yet Bass is still struggling.
That’s the part that should make every Democrat in Washington, D.C. nervous. If a left-wing mayor in one of the most left-wing cities in America can’t clear 50 percent, something has gone badly wrong for that faction of the party. And bringing in the woman who just lost a presidential election to a candidate the media spent years calling an existential threat to democracy isn’t exactly a confidence builder.
From 2020 to 2025, nearly 100,000 people fled the city of Los Angeles alone — a 2.4% population drop in just five years, according to Fox News. Los Angeles County lost more residents than any other county in the country during that stretch. People don’t flee cities that are working.
The June 2 election is coming. Early voting has already started. And somewhere in the rubble of the Pacific Palisades, a man who lost everything is running against a mayor who wasn’t there — now backed by a former vice president who wasn’t anywhere either.
Sources: Mediaite, Fox News, CBS News, NBC News, Yahoo News, Newsweek, Washington Times, ABC7 Los Angeles, Deseret News, Fox News Digital, Daily Signal