Two massive digital billboard trucks spent hours circling Los Angeles City Hall on Tuesday, May 12, blasting one simple message at every bureaucrat, staffer, and politician inside: "Spencer, take out the trash." The "trash," of course, being a play on Mayor Karen Bass's last name — "basura" is Spanish for trash — and honestly, it might be the most accurate political ad in California history.
When you're so bad at your job that people literally pay to drive billboards around your office building telling everyone, maybe it's time for a career change.
The stunt is tied to the increasingly chaotic Los Angeles mayoral race, where 42-year-old reality TV star Spencer Pratt has emerged as a legitimate challenger to the 72-year-old Bass. The two billboard trucks looped around key government buildings and high-traffic downtown streets for hours, their giant screens blasting clips from Pratt's viral campaign videos — the same ones that have racked up massive engagement on TikTok, Instagram, and X.
The whole spectacle was designed to remind Los Angeles voters of what they already know: their mayor is a disaster.
And the list of failures isn't short. Pratt's campaign has hammered Bass on homelessness, crime, and what supporters call the "homeless industrial complex" — hundreds of millions in city spending with nothing to show for it. His viral videos depict dystopian LA scenes featuring homelessness, graffiti, trash, and crime. The problem for Bass is that those aren't exaggerations. That's just what Los Angeles looks like now.
Pratt told The Post that the billboard ads "were not linked to his campaign," which is political speak for "somebody out there likes me enough to do this on their own." Whether that's technically true or just legally convenient, the result is the same: two trucks making Karen Bass's Tuesday a whole lot worse.
The billboard campaign frames City Hall as "bloated, corrupt and failing on homelessness, crime and basic city services." Again — they're not wrong. This is the same city that bungled its wildfire response so badly that entire neighborhoods burned while hydrants ran dry. The same city where encampments line every freeway overpass. The same city where businesses are fleeing because the local government treats shoplifters like victims and store owners like the problem.
What makes this beautiful is the guerrilla nature of it. This isn't a Super PAC buying 30-second TV spots that nobody watches. This is physical, unavoidable, rolling through the streets where the people who run this city have to see it. You can't skip a billboard truck. You can't change the channel. It's just there, circling your workplace, reminding everyone you've failed.
Pratt has built his entire campaign on aggressive, internet-native messaging — the kind of raw, anti-establishment energy that traditional political consultants would have a stroke over. He's positioning himself as the outsider against a machine that has spent years lighting taxpayer money on fire. And with the June 2 primary approaching and a large number of voters still undecided, the fact that a reality TV star is even competitive against an incumbent mayor tells you everything about how badly Bass has blown it.
The people of Los Angeles didn't need a billboard truck to know their mayor is failing. But it sure was a nice touch.