On Sunday mornings, Hollywood Boulevard is quiet and the terrazzo and brass stars of the “walk of fame” are grimy with the footsteps of Saturday night’s excess. For a few blissful hours, the locals reclaim the neighbourhood. Church services, morning joggers, and, on the intersection at Iver Avenue, the tradition of the farmers’ market that has been running for 30 years. It’s crowded by 9am and the stalls are a vivid confection of organic fruits and vegetables by local farmers, buskers, myriad food stalls and the atmosphere is serene and pleasant. The haze has not yet burned off but you can make out the white-lettered Hollywood sign on the hills above the city.
Melrose Larry Green is a native New Yorker who has called Los Angeles home for four decades. He seems to know half the market. He’s a talker and has a public profile as a long-time, colourful contributor to the Howard Stern show as part of the “wack pack”. Upon hearing “Ireland” he broke into an unsolicited version of Danny Boy.
He is wearing a badge supporting Nithya Raman, the councilwoman and mayoral contender whose fourth district covers an immense area, including central LA, the southern San Fernando Valley and eastern Santa Monica. When the votes came in after Tuesday night’s primary, Raman seemed destined to finish a close third, behind current mayor Karen Bass and independent candidate Spencer Pratt, a former reality television star who has run a sort of guerrilla campaign fuelled by populist promises and celebrity endorsements. But the California vote-count process is long and complex and lasts for weeks. And over the weekend, the latest tranche of votes brought Raman surging back into contention and coming close to eclipsing the vote of the ebullient Pratt.
“I’m pretty conservative but in this case I am voting for a hard-left Democrat because she is wonderful. Nithya is for everybody,” Green says, showing me the Trump wristlet he wears to explain his rationale.
RM Block
“Nithya is progressive. Democrats and Republicans need to work together. Karen Bass has not done a good job. I feel she has been asleep at the wheel. The street lights are on; copper wire being stolen. The mayor needs to work with the president. The cost of housing ... there is plenty of vacant land and property but the red tape bureaucracy is terrible. Sometimes it takes two years to get a restaurant open. Even [New York mayor Zohran] Mamdani has met with Trump three times already. Karen Bass, it took her a year and a half. She needs to work with Trump from day one. Mamdani initiated the meeting with him.
“This whole nonsense by Trump has been fabricated by the media. In my opinion, he’s a great president. But Nithya is also a great person. See I don’t eat seven-course meals, my friend. I eat a la carte. The president has the money. The roads are falling apart in LA. The sidewalks. A cordial meeting with Donald Trump and mayor Raman might give us five, eight billion dollars in one snap of the fingers. I don’t care how much these people hate Trump. I’d rather have roads and people in houses.”
As it happened, NBC aired an interview with president Donald Trump on Sunday morning in which he used the California elections as further proof that the US election system is rigged.
The interview with Kristen Welker, the anchor of Meet The Press, was recorded on Friday, during a presidential visit to Wisconsin and was set in the heavily symbolic setting of an actual barn, with hay bales and a John Deere tractor in the background, and the unlikely presence of two plush velvet chairs and an American flag placed behind the president. Over the course of the in-depth interview, Trump became increasingly irascible when pressed on whether the US could become entrenched in the Iran conflict despite his promise to end the “forever wars”, and at times had to raise his voice to be heard over a rainstorm pelting against the metal roof. Then, the audio broke down.
But the interview took a hostile turn when Trump defended the Insurrection Fund proposal and the January 6th rioters. “They pled guilty because they were frightened, they went down, they were ushered into the building, many of them were arrested without even going into the building ... the people were destroyed by dirty cops and weaponisation,” he said before turning to the ongoing election counts in California as proof of continuing fraud.
“Listen to me,” he told Welker.
“There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. And it’s happening right now again in California. Right now. It’s four days in California and they aren’t even close to coming up with a winner. You know why they are doing that? Because they are cheating on the election. They’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked and Meet The Press is crooked. You’re either crooked or stupid – you play right into their hands with this. You know the elections are rigged. We’re like a Third World country. Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked. And so is NBC. And CBS. And CNN. You are one-sided crooked networks. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough.”
It was yet another extraordinary moment that caught the strange mutual need and loathing between the president and the US media he habitually castigates. No president berates media figures in the way that Trump does. And no president has given the media as much access.
“Mr president I’ve travelled all the way to Wisconsin,” Welker, who remained unfazed by the attack, countered.
“I’ve sat in the rain with you on and off for an hour and I’ve given you enough time,” Trump said, before detaching his microphone and literally walking out of the barn.
Trump and Welker spoke again over the weekend and, she said, they both acknowledged that the technical difficulties had contributed to the acrimony – and he agreed to another interview.
But it was odd to watch this unfold in early morning Los Angeles, which seems spiritually and geographically very far removed from midwestern barns. Melrose Larry Green had not heard about the interview but flatly rejects the idea that the California elections are rigged.
[ Donald Trump too tired to have a go at ‘Sleepy Joe’Opens in new window ]
“I don’t agree with him on that. And that’s okay. I think he is wrong on that. And the reason I say that is that there are strict laws in California on ballot harvesting, on voter eligibility. Maybe some people don’t like the laws but there is not one iota of evidence of any fraud. Look, people can think what they want. I can think I am playing for the New York Knicks tomorrow night in basketball. But I’m not. And Trump is wrong on that. By the way, I was in a movie about the Knicks with Whoopi Goldberg called Eddie. I had one line! It was, ‘That’s Walt Frazier’s jersey’.”
But prominent Republican voices in California continue to highlight the painstakingly slow count system. Former state representative and House speaker Kevin McCarthy laid the blame on the desk of governor Gavin Newsom. The election count in the primaries to narrow down the field for his successor is equally slow burning.
“Gavin changed a number of election laws. We were very liberal in rules about absentee ballots but we had accountability,” McCarthy told Fox News on Sunday.
“Now we have same day voter and you don’t have to show ID. Everybody gets mailed a ballot but he didn’t clean up the rolls. So that raises doubt in people’s mind, when you take away transparency. When you look at the Los Angeles mayor’s race. The third placed person gave a concession speech and cried. But she was getting most votes in the last drop [of results]. So if she didn’t even believe she could move up that puts in question the whole election itself and brings doubt. California can do better and it just shows what Gavin has done to the state.”
Spencer Pratt’s unconventional campaign has had its origins in the terrible wildfires of last January that destroyed vast sections of the Pacific Palisades and the Altadena neighbourhood. Twenty-nine people died – although recent reports suggest an attributable death count of more than 400. The fires destroyed an estimated $240 billion (€208 billion) in property and displaced 200,000 residents, from film and music celebrities to retirees. Pratt was predicting a revolution but as of Sunday, his lead over Raman for the right to contest the November election against Bass had narrowed to just over 7,000 votes (184,596 votes to 177,102) with a full 20 per cent yet to be counted.
Homelessness, failing infrastructure, housing and the feeling that the state has failed the city’s film and entertainment industry are chief concerns in this election. Matt Carmody is an Australian who moved to California with his wife. They live in West Hollywood. He sees the rise of Pratt in the city as a localised “extension of Trump being elected twice”.
“Australia has its own issues but I’m sure it’s similar in Ireland in that everything is much more moderate and to the centre,” he told me as he waited for an order at a food stand.
[ ‘I am tired of amateur hour’: Republicans test the limits of Trump’s powerOpens in new window ]
“Things here seem so polarised and extreme. Homelessness is a big issue here in Los Angeles which never seems to get properly addressed. The city just seems to move people from one area to the next. And I mean, I don’t know how to run a giant city but the infrastructure isn’t great. You really need a car – I used to take a train to work from West Hollywood. That’s kind of what I was used to doing but here it’s a bit more of a grim prospect. The stations at either end ... there’s a police presence because of drug use. So, there are things to be sorted.”
But Sundays are sacred and on the small strip of Hollywood real estate where the traffic was diverted and country produce was in abundance, nobody seemed too worried about elections, or the city’s problems or anything else. They’d still be waiting on Monday.
