Mixed martial arts hall of famer Tito Ortiz’s stint on the first season of Celebrity Apprentice ended when the future president hosting the show uttered the dreaded words.
“You’re fired!”
After that fateful moment in 2008, MMA star Tito Ortiz was shown striding solitary from Trump Tower. He later said he was mesmerized by The Donald during his time on the show.
“My eyes have been opened like never before in my whole life,” Ortiz told a reporter for The Ringer regarding his encounter with Trump.
Trump hosted seven more seasons of the show, leaving in 2015 and parlaying his brand into a run for president. He announced his candidacy in the lobby of the tower Ortiz had left in defeat. Ortiz remained a believer in The Donald and was a big Trump supporter in 2016.
As the 2020 election approached, Ortiz decided to make a Trumpian run of his own for public office. The fighter known as the “Huntington Beach Bad Boy” declared himself one of 15 candidates for three spots on the city council in his California hometown.
“Make Huntington Beach safe again!” declared Ortiz, who in 2010 was accused of domestic abuse by porn-star girlfriend Jenna Jameson (she later recanted) and who pleaded no-contest in 2014 to driving under the influence.
As Ortiz unveiled his campaign slogan, COVID-19 was spiking in Southern California, and an incumbent city council member suggested that one simple way to make Huntington Beach and everywhere else safer would be to wear a mask. But the threat that Ortiz invoked was a Trump bugaboo: radical left-wing demonstrators.
“They’re going to come down and burn this city down,” Ortiz told the crowd at a MAGA-ween rally on Oct. 31 in Huntington Beach. “They’re going to rape the women and the children. Bullshit, not on my watch!”
Ortiz was a mini-Donald regarding the pandemic. He dismissed it as just a flu and part of a Democratic political plot sure to disappear after the election. He refused to wear a mask, saying they in fact make you ill by harboring viruses and bacteria.
Ortiz even suggested to The Ringer as the election neared that ventilators were “speeding up the process of COVID.”
By then, COVID-19 was hitting the city hard enough that such nonsense should have ensured defeat at the polls.
“Everybody knows someone who’s been sick or hospitalized or in some situation passed away,” Huntington Beach Mayor Kim Carr told The Daily Beast. “He and I have mutual friends who have been in the hospital. It’s just shocking to me that anybody would be that cavalier.”
But on the same day that a majority of the American people told Trump “you’re fired!” Ortiz was a HUGE winner in Huntington Beach. Ortiz finished first in the field of 15, garnering 44,322 votes in a city whose population is just over 200,000.
“The most votes in HB history,” Ortiz tweeted. “Never wore a mask once!”
When asked to explain Ortiz’s victory, Carr told The Daily Beast, “He’s a celebrity. Look at Trump. People love celebrity.”
And in Huntington Beach, the top vote-getter also becomes the next mayor when the current one’s term ends a year later.
Get ready for Mayor Ortiz.
A portent of how that might play out came when Ortiz was sworn in an as a city council member on Dec. 7. He refused to wear a mask in City Hall and later gave a completely false excuse.
“Wearing masks actually drops the oxygen levels required by the U.S. government, making City of HB libel for dangerously low air intake levels!” Ortiz later texted the Orange County Register with Trumpian spelling.
He complied with the clerk’s instructions to raise his right hand and repeat after her, though he stumbled over the words on several occasions, at one point turning “solemnly swear” into “sally swear.”
He then proceeded to offer his first public remarks as an elected official. He thanked the voters and his donors for having invited him into their homes as well as giving him the opportunity to “speak to large groups of people.”
“Of course, with this COVID thing…” he said. “Let me say this right, ‘plandemic’ or ‘pandemic.’”
He smiled and gave a laugh.
At a subsequent regular meeting of the council, one of Ortiz’s fellow members chastised him for not wearing a mask. Carr weighed in, making reference to Ortiz’s speech.
“This is not a ‘plandemic,’” Carr said. “This is very real, and it’s up to us as Huntington Beach residents to protect one another… I’m sorry if I sound a bit exasperated, but it is absolutely emotional for me that we cannot get people just to do something simple as to wear a mask.”
The man slated to become Carr’s successor spoke at a Stop the Steal rally on Dec. 13 at Huntington Pier. He stepped onto the stage in a T-shirt reading “Living the American Dream.”
“Tito! Tito!” people cried out.
Ortiz began by telling the crowd that he had received a text from the city manager saying that he could not speak there as the mayor pro tem or as a city council member.
“You know what I am? I’m a patriot!” Ortiz exclaimed.
He described the current political conflict across the country.
“This is good versus evil,” he said. “I don’t want a communist country… Communists are trying to take over America.”
He made reference to his now famous “plandemic” remark.
“It is,” he said of the supposed COVID hoax. “I’ve done my research.”
He took Trumpism a step further into Ortizism regarding the COVID-19 vaccines.
“I ain’t taking that vaccine, hell no!” he declared.
“Everybody talks about pro-choice and choice of our bodies. Those same people are saying you gotta take a vaccine. To hell with that! Ain’t happening!”
That brought whoops from the crowd.
“Louder! Louder! Louder!” Ortiz replied.
The Huntington Beach Bad Boy and future mayor declared his new moniker in the political ring.
“Tito Ortiz the Patriot!”
He said this barefaced to a largely maskless crowd, having just decried by word and example face coverings and vaccines, the only real defense we have in our greatest national emergency. This supposed patriot sworn into office on Dec. 7 might as well have been fueling Japanese planes to attack Pearl Harbor.
As of last week, one in 300 residents in Huntington Beach had been infected with COVID and one in 2,000 had died in the pandemic. The availability of ICU beds in the whole region was officially listed by health authorities as “0.0%.” And emergency operators dispatched paramedics to assist ever more people with COVID symptoms. The ambulances then sometimes had to wait hours outside a hospital before there was room for another patient.
In less than a fortnight, we will have a new president and the nation will be able to address the pandemic as it should have from the start.
But Huntington Beach will still be stuck with Ortiz, a future mayor who even Trump thought was an Apprentice loser.
