Good afternoon from Washington, and welcome to Party Animals, a weekly dispatch on politics, power, and society in the nation’s capital.

As I write, an open and empty suitcase is staring at me anxiously from the floor. I’m set to fly to Los Angeles in a few hours. It’s Oscars week, which means we’ll be in town and attending the weekend’s many festivities—including, of course, Vanity Fair’s after-party, held this year at LACMA.

Hollywood’s big week comes at a perilous time. The war in Iran, which President Donald Trump this week declared to be both “just the beginning” and “very complete,” looks set to rage on, lending the proceedings a similar shadow to the one over the 2003 Academy Awards, which occurred just days after the US invasion of Iraq. That was a different time, of course, when the rally-around-the-flag effect meant that even in liberal Tinseltown, Michael Moore’s speech at the ceremony condemning the war was met with boos and reproach.

What of Los Angeles in 2026? As I prepared for a visit to this bastion of liberalism, a town so tethered to progressive ideals in the common imagination that it’s long been a sneering shorthand for left politics on Fox News, I sought to examine the extent of support for Trump in Hollywood. Read on for a history of the town’s secret conservatives, from the Bush presidency in the wake of war to the endless Trump era.

Also mentioned in this issue: Piers Morgan, Spencer Pratt, Ben Shapiro, Zohran Mamdani, Bari Weiss, Ric Grenell, Karen Bass, Robert Costa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ben Jacobs, Marco Rubio, Matthew Frank, James Talarico, Ro Khanna, JD Vance, Raheem Kassam, and CJ Pearson.

Got tips? Hit the Party Animals hotline: aidan_mclaughlin@condenast.com. Or text me—my personal number is 917-817-8266. Complaints will be met with boos and reproach. Praise will be read aloud in the dining room of Dan Tana’s.

• I was in London last weekend and ventured out to Kensington for lunch with Piers Morgan at his local pub. Over a pint of Harvey’s and fish and chips, the tabloid king spoke about his burgeoning digital empire. His YouTube show, Uncensored, is a behemoth, and he just brought on ex-MSNBC president Rashida Jones as CEO. Morgan, ever the brawler, is currently battling a fellow YouTube titan online over Israel. “Ben Shapiro cannot tolerate any criticism of the Israeli government,” Morgan tells me. “He’s part of the Israeli government spin machine and unashamedly so.” Morgan thinks Shapiro is fueling anti-Israel sentiment that’s growing in the US. “I’m always keen to stress to people, it’s not about Israel or Israeli people,” he adds. “It’s about this particular Israeli government, which I think is the most hard-right government that Israel’s ever had, and which seems to be in a perpetual war motion. And the idea that you can’t be remotely critical of a government that’s behaving like this, I think, is ridiculous.”

• If there’s one thing controversial CBS News editor Bari Weiss has earned praise for it’s her hands-on booking of big names for the network. But there’s one booking she seems to have blown up: New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had been in talks to appear for an interview on CBS News Sunday Morning with Robert Costa. Mamdani’s team, I’m told, has long been averse to appearing on CBS given the coverage his campaign got from Weiss’s The Free Press, but her recent social media post reacting with a fire emoji to an Iranian activist’s diatribe against Mamdani was the “nail in the coffin” for him appearing on the network, two sources with knowledge told me. “Bari and her people have a clear axe to grind for him,” said one former CBS producer. (CBS News did not respond to a request for comment.) And the network’s turn away from news and toward opinion is proving to be a broader problem. “It’s not just Zohran,” the source said. “It’s really hard now to get people to come on CBS.”

• The Swedish Embassy threw a party celebrating 250 years of friendship between the United States and Sweden this week. The ambassador was absent, having returned to Stockholm amid a crisis in the relationship between Sweden and the United States. You wouldn’t have known it from the party, where American military officers and Swedish diplomats swigged Peronis and ate meatballs. I had an eye-opening chat with the former Belarussian ambassador to the United States, Valery Tsepkalo, and his wife, Veronika, a Belarussian activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. They live in exile in England but visit the US to lobby Trump to free political prisoners in their home country—apparently, they said, to great effect.

Donald Trump Jr., Donald Trump, Melania Trump and Barron Trump.

M. Tran/ FilmMagic.

Does a Trump Fan lurk behind every palm tree?

According to Spencer Pratt, people keep coming up to Spencer Pratt to tell him how much they support his long-shot bid for mayor of Los Angeles. Privately. “I can tell you,” he interrupts me in the middle of my first question, “and we can meet up and I’ll do a lie detector test if you want, maybe the most powerful CEO in all of Hollywood, secretly—I was just informed and it’s a fact—supports everything I’m doing.”

It’s not just the maybe most powerful CEO in all of Hollywood. “I was at a dinner a night ago,” Pratt adds, “and maybe one of the biggest movie star directors, blah, blah, blah, him and his wife came up to me and said they fully back me.”

And it’s not just Hollywood. “I’ve had three CEOs of major—of the biggest record labels in the world—text me saying they support everything I do, want me to win,” he says.

None of these masters of the universe are backing the star of 2000s reality hit The Hills publicly, and in an interview this week, he won’t tell me their names. But he assures me they exist, and the only reason for their silence is fear within Hollywood and across Los Angeles of backing someone like Pratt as he challenges Karen Bass, the sitting Democratic mayor, as an outspoken conservative and registered Republican.

So far, the notorious reality villain has succeeded in picking up public endorsements from childhood friend (and The Hills costar) Brody Jenner as well as Ric Grenell, the former diplomat President Trump appointed as interim president of the Kennedy Center who promptly ran the Kennedy Center into the ground. Kingmakers they may not be, but a new poll found Bass’s approval rating at a dismal 24%—and Pratt as her closest competitor in a race that could pit the pair against each other in a runoff.

That Pratt is even part of the conversation in Los Angeles is a sign of how much the city has changed in the last decade. In 2016, Trump—the reality-TV presidential candidate—drew just 22% of the vote in Los Angeles County. That share increased to 27% in 2020, even as Trump lost to Joe Biden, and 32% in 2024.

As that share grows, the specter of the hidden Trump voter looms larger in Hollywood. It’s now a place where the locals see behind every palm tree a secret MAGA fan who keeps his views on migration and Muslims to himself, lest he jeopardize his already fragile career and be forever banished back to bartending.

“Just back from a dinner in West Hollywood,” Bret Easton Ellis observed, perhaps apocryphally, during the 2016 campaign. “Shocked the majority of the table was voting for Trump but they would never admit it publicly.”

“I can tell you,” says Piers Morgan, who lives between London and a home in Beverly Hills, “there are a lot of people who almost drop their voices and say, ‘Whatever you think of Trump, he gets stuff done,’ and all this kind of thing. And they’re the people you’d least expect.”

This clandestine cohort includes “high-acheiving, high-end Hollywood people,” Morgan tells me, those one would assume to be “classic liberals.” The presenter suggests these camo MAGAs warmed to Trump in response to the excesses of progressives during his first term in the White House.

“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.’”

There has always been a vocal conservative minority in Hollywood. Often, its members have felt the need to operate in the shadows. In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, actor and Bush supporter Gary Sinise launched Friends of Abe, a secretive salon for conservatives in the entertainment industry. The group was a home for those on the right who often felt victimized by the dominance of liberal thought in the entertainment industry. It lasted until 2016, when some of its members said that bitter infighting over Trump’s insurgent candidacy played a part in destroying the group from within.

Some big names in Hollywood emerged to support Trump’s political project, though the list remains short and mostly features stars who’ve long since disappeared beyond the horizon, like James Woods and Rob Schneider. Some emerged as Trump supporters ahead of 2024, including Brian Grazer, a top Hollywood producer and longtime Democratic donor who said coming out as a Trump voter in Hollywood felt like “getting canceled.”

“There’s only a few that have publicly said, ‘We love Donald Trump as a president,’ because there’s danger in doing that,” says Bill O’Reilly, who has counseled some prominent Trump supporters in Hollywood. “If you’re an actor or somebody who’s dependent upon subjective decision-making, you’d be foolish to take a chance and spout political stuff.”

Sylvester Stallone with Trump at The 48th Annual Kennedy Center Honors in December.

Tracey Salazar/Getty Images.

Despite Los Angeles’s hostility toward the right, Trump has always had a special place in his heart for it. Just days before his inauguration last year, he announced that he was naming Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson to be his “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, charged with reviving the struggling film industry. The rollout was all very Trumpian. Gibson, seemingly stunned, said he found out about his big new job like everyone else: from Trump’s post.

None of Trump’s ambassadors have found success building on his support among Angelenos since the election, and in the end, 2024 could prove the high water mark. As his presidency plummets in popularity amid the Epstein debacle, tariffs, and the chaotic war with Iran, many who held their noses and voted for him are expressing buyer’s remorse—including one prominent producer I spoke with.

“I almost wrote in the Hawk Tuah girl,” said the producer, on condition of anonymity so as to share that he almost wrote in the Hawk Tuah girl. “It’s all theater. I’ve always thought both sides are the same. Until now.”

• Hollywood donors are falling in love with Dems again: The Ankler’s Matthew Frank reports that, after a grim year, moneyed liberal donors in Los Angeles are reopening the war chests for certain buzzy Democrats like James Talarico and Ro Khanna.

• You can take the Pentagon chief off cable news, but you can’t…: Defense Department officials barred press photographers from briefings on the war in Iran because they took “unflattering” photos of Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News weekend host who has become the face of the war.

• Marco Rubio pulls ahead of JD Vance in Trump’s personal 2028 poll: Trump keeps polling friends, advisers, and Mar-a-Lago members on who should succeed him in 2028. Rubio has emerged as a front-runner, according to The Wall Street Journal.