Honesty Is Currency. America Has Been Running a Deficit for Years.
I’ll say this about Spencer Pratt: when the Palisades burned, he didn’t reach for a media consultant. He pulled out his phone, pointed it at the smoke, and showed the world his family’s life reduced to ash. No talking points. No tearful presser. Just a man in shock, broadcasting raw grief to anyone who cared to watch. Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass was posing for photos at an embassy cocktail party in Ghana — 7,500 miles away — at the precise moment evacuation orders went out for the Palisades. She later called the trip “absolutely” a mistake. The voters filed that away.
The takeaway from this week’s Los Angeles mayoral primary isn’t complicated. Pratt — a reality TV star with zero governing experience — is holding second place in a 14-candidate field with ballots still being counted, currently leading City Councilmember Nithya Raman toward a November runoff against Bass. He got there because Los Angeles recognized something real and had been starved of it long enough that a former Hills cast member looked like the adult in the room. That ought to embarrass a few people in Washington. It doesn’t, but it ought to.
Credibility is a currency. It stores value, compounds when well-managed, and collapses when debased. The American political class has been running a debasement program for decades, and Gallup now measures confidence in the mass media at 28 percent — the first sub-30 percent reading in fifty years of tracking. When you print too much paper backed by nothing, people eventually figure out it’s not worth what it claims to be.
Chuck Schumer’s Father’s Day cookout photo in 2024 is the genus specimen. He placed a slice of cheese on a raw burger patty. Not undercooked. Raw. He deleted the post after the internet was done with him. The NRSC ran a campaign video about it nearly a year later because the mockery outlasted the moment. A man who has represented New York for three decades from a Manhattan apartment decided Father’s Day was his moment to become a regular guy. The bill was presented. The market rejected it.
Elizabeth Warren’s New Year’s Eve 2018 beer stunt was counterfeit populism — the casual phrasing, the working-class Michelob Ultra, the husband thanking her for having him in their own kitchen while she drank alone on camera. Every element was manufactured to signal authenticity. Voters recognized it as a forgery almost immediately. You can’t replicate the serial number. The same pattern held elsewhere: Clinton’s accent shifted by zip code, Harris recalibrated by room. The face value kept changing. The underlying reserve never existed.
Joe Biden was the inflation model. More words, declining purchasing power. Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2024 report called him “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” His response was to hold a press conference and call Zelensky “President Putin” on camera. The handlers kept issuing more currency. The voters kept discounting it. By the end, the denomination on the bill and its actual purchasing power had almost nothing to do with each other.
Most commentary stops at the catalogue of fakes. The more useful question is what authentic communication actually produces — not just the absence of fraud, but something with genuine value. Abraham Lincoln gives you the answer. When a rival accused him of being “two-faced,” he replied: “If I had two faces, would I show the world this one?” A man with one face — the same face in every room — can let people see it clearly. That consistency is sound money: every transaction confirms the same backing, and over time, people stop checking. They just use it. Reagan had it. His “Morning in America” was backed by real reserves — interest rates halved from their 1980 highs, inflation more than halved. In thirty years of advising ultra-high-net-worth investors, I’ve seen the same principle hold. The advisor who tells you the portfolio is down 18 percent before you read it in the statement earns something that compounds. There’s a predictability premium on telling the truth early. Most politicians haven’t figured out it exists.
Pratt, for now, has cash in hand. Not because his qualifications are established — they aren’t — but because he arrived in this race the way cash arrives in a crisis: immediately, obviously real, no intermediary required. Reports surfaced that he’d been staying at the Hotel Bel-Air while his ads featured a trailer. A man who lost his home needs somewhere to sleep. The press hammered it anyway — the same press that gave Bass’s Accra cocktail party photos comparatively gentle treatment.
The lesson isn’t that the celebrity wins. A debased currency creates demand for anything genuine. The political class can keep printing counterfeit confidence and wondering why nobody’s spending it, or they can try something harder: mean what they say, say what they mean, and stop putting cheese on a raw hamburger and telling everyone they grew up at the grill. The currency America needs isn’t printed in Washington. It’s earned one transaction at a time by being the same person whether the camera’s on or not. You can’t quantitative-ease your way to credibility.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPenn, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.