Fox News led its Election Day coverage with a headline declaring Spencer Pratt the “Trump-backed” candidate soaring in the Los Angeles mayoral race. There is just one problem with that framing. President Trump has never endorsed Spencer Pratt.
He has never said the words. He has never posted them where it counts. And in a city as reflexively hostile to the president as Los Angeles, hanging that label on a surging outsider candidate on the very day voters head to the polls is not a neutral act of reporting. It is, at best, sloppy. At worst, it is a thumb pressed firmly on the scale against the candidate.
Consider what actually happened. Speaking to reporters less than two weeks before the June 2 primary, Trump offered a few offhand words about Pratt. “I’d like to see him do well. He’s a character. I heard he’s a big MAGA person.”
That is the entire substance of the supposed endorsement. A passing compliment to a “character” the president had apparently only heard about secondhand. There was no rally, no statement from the campaign, no formal declaration of support. Most importantly, there was NO stated endorsement on Truth Social despite many endorsements in California races the night before.
How Trump actually endorses
Anyone who has paid attention to this president for the last decade knows precisely how he makes an endorsement. He does it deliberately, in all caps, on his Truth Social account, with the kind of fanfare that leaves no ambiguity. He did exactly that last week when he backed Rep. Randy Feenstra in Iowa’s gubernatorial primary. He did it in early April when his endorsement of Steve Hilton in the California governor’s race blunted the momentum of rival Chad Bianco. He did it the night before the California election with several nods to Republicans candidates. He did not mention Spencer Pratt at all.
When Trump wants the world to know he is behind a candidate, the world knows.
Tellingly, even the gossip outlet that first floated the prospect of a Pratt endorsement reported a White House official confirming that any official backing would come directly from the president on Truth Social. It never came. The distance between “I heard he’s a big MAGA person” and a Truth Social endorsement is the distance between a man making small talk and a man making a political decision. Fox collapsed that distance into a single hyphenated word, “Trump-backed,” and ran it as the lede.
Pratt wants no part of it
What makes the headline stranger still is that Pratt himself has gone out of his way to reject precisely this framing. When NBC News pressed him on a potential Trump endorsement, he refused the bait entirely. “I don’t need anyone’s endorsement but mothers’. That’s who’s getting me elected,” Pratt said. “My race is a local race. I don’t care what’s going on in the national politics, in other states. I am running for a local position.”
He went further, identifying the nationalization of local elections as the very disease he is running against. “This, this right here, what you’re doing, you having this conversation is what’s destroyed local elections,” he told the network. “People don’t care. In L.A., they want to feel safe, they don’t want to step in human poop.”
Pratt understands his own city. His campaign has surged not on partisan tribalism but on the visceral frustration of Angelenos watching their streets decay, their fire response collapse, and their tax dollars vanish into a homelessness apparatus with almost nothing to show for it. He has carefully kept national politics at arm’s length precisely because he knows what it costs in Los Angeles.
Why the label is a weapon in this city
And it does cost. Los Angeles is one of the deepest-blue cities in the deepest-blue state in the union. Pratt is running as an independent without an “R” beside his name on the nonpartisan ballot, and that is no accident.
Political analysts watching the race have been blunt about the math. The more voters who come to believe Trump is backing Pratt, the harder it becomes for him to build any coalition beyond a conservative base that could never carry a citywide election on its own.
His Democrat opponents grasped this instantly. Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman both seized on the president’s stray remarks, with Raman sneering about Trump’s “LA apprentice” and Bass invoking ICE raids. They want the Trump label fixed to Pratt because they know it repels the very voters he needs.
Which raises the uncomfortable question. When a major news network takes a president’s offhand compliment, inflates it into a formal endorsement, and broadcasts it as its top headline on the morning Angelenos vote, who exactly benefits? Not the candidate, who explicitly disavowed the framing. Not the voters, who are handed a distortion dressed as fact. The beneficiaries are the entrenched incumbents who have spent the entire race trying to nationalize a local election they would otherwise lose on the merits.
A wise man does not believe everything he is told. He who is first in his own cause seems just, until his neighbor comes and examines him. Fox built the case for Pratt’s opponents and called it a headline.
None of this requires assuming malice. It may be nothing more than the lazy reflex of a press that cannot conceive of a Republican-leaning candidate existing outside Trump’s orbit, that reduces every conservative to a MAGA appendage because doing so is easier than reporting the actual contours of a race.
But the effect is the same whether the motive is laziness or design. A man whom the president has never endorsed, who has begged the political world to leave national politics out of his local campaign, was branded “Trump-backed” on the one day that branding could do him the most damage. Words have consequences, and editors choose them on purpose. This one was a gift to Karen Bass.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
