President Donald Trump and Dr Phil McGraw in the Rose Garden of the White House in May. Trump has publicly praised Dr Phil’s work. Photo / Pete Marovich, The New York Times
The daytime TV fixture seems to have taken a rightward turn. But don’t call it politics.
My session with Dr Phil had reached an impasse.
About three hours in, seated inside the Dallas megamansion where he is steering his transition from daytime TV behemoth to Maga-friendly newsperson, the once-licensed psychologist was giving no ground on what seemed to me an obvious point.
“I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about politics,” he said. And so, he insisted, he really hadn’t.
This was difficult to square with recent events.
In the last two years, Dr Phil (surname: McGraw) had ended his flagship talk show and created his own news and entertainment network, trafficking daily in conservative-coded subjects in a crusade against “the woke left.”
He had spoken glowingly of President Donald Trump as an invited guest at Trump’s Madison Square Garden campaign rally, at a White House faith event and at a recent Texas flood briefing, where the president interrupted himself after spotting Dr Phil - “There’s Dr Phil. Look at Dr Phil. You’re looking good, Phil. This is a hell of a situation, isn’t it?”
Most strikingly, Dr Phil had secured intimate access to embed with a camera crew on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, pledging to agents that his broadcasting aim was to “tell your story and have your back.”
Dr Phil likes to say that his focus is social and cultural issues and always has been, since his Oprah-ordained rise as a tough-loving public mediator of family dramas. It is the politicians, he says, who have lurched into his lane, not the other way around.
What is beyond debate is that Dr Phil, 74, has exposed his shrink-next-door reputation to the whims of a fractured, fractious media ecosystem quite unlike the one he conquered.
It has already been messy. Last month, his company, Merit Street Media, filed for bankruptcy in a hail of litigation involving its faith-based partner, Trinity Broadcasting Network. (Dr Phil swiftly announced a new venture with similar ambitions, Envoy Media, and has begun producing content under its banner.)
Yet whatever his professional fortunes, Dr Phil has emerged once more as an avatar of his times, a testament to the commingling of entertainment and civic life.
Can it really be said that Dr Phil looks out of place, lumbering on a balky knee beside federal authorities, making “Cops”-style television out of early-morning Ice arrests?
“With so much fake news circulating about the work Ice agents do, we’re grateful for those like Dr. Phil who are willing to share the truth,” Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, said in a statement sent by the White House. The two have regularly shared the screen.
Dr Phil’s public journey began, inadvertently, before an audience of one: the most famous civil defendant in daytime.
Raised across Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas - his hard-drinking father was an oil rig equipment supplier before he pursued a psychology career - Dr Phil worked initially as a psychologist himself. He later co-founded a trial preparation consultancy, attracting high-profile clients including, fatefully, Oprah Winfrey.
She hired him after Texas cattle ranchers sued over a 1996 episode about mad cow disease. After the trial, Winfrey was so taken with Dr Phil that she made him an on-air regular.
By 2002, he had his own show, entrenching himself firmly in the zeitgeist of the new millennium. He hosted quarrelling couples, unruly teenagers, a sitting president and first lady (George W. and Laura Bush) and a go-to financial guru and future senator named Elizabeth Warren.
He enshrined himself - alongside Dr Mehmet Oz, now Trump’s overseer of Medicare and Medicaid - as part of an Oprah-branded constellation whose emphasis on health and wellness seemed to partly presage the Make America Healthy Again movement. (A representative for Winfrey did not respond to messages.)
While Dr Phil was sometimes criticised for unseemly voyeurism or reductive counsel, there was evidence that his show did some good. A 2016 study found that devoted Dr Phil viewers were likelier to seek mental health treatment.
As with much of daytime television, including Winfrey’s show, the moment of peak cultural primacy passed. Ratings sagged.
Beyond the Paramount lot where he filmed in Hollywood, Dr Phil hinted at broader interests. In public appearances, he defended trans people and backed gun reform measures after mass shootings. He dissected white privilege on The Breakfast Club radio show.
He started a podcast (Phil in the Blanks) in 2019. He appraised Trump, sometimes critically, on late-night television.
“I can’t diagnose him because I haven’t done proper evaluations,” Dr Phil told Jimmy Kimmel mischievously during the president’s first term. But “certain personality disorders” came to mind.
When Covid hit, Dr Phil seemed to find more common cause with the political right, chastising authorities over school lockdowns. “I was labelled a nut,” he told Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now Trump’s health secretary, during an affectionate televised forum in the spring.
Dr Phil ended in 2023 - of his volition, he has said.
He produced a new book, We’ve Got Issues, pitched directly at the culture wars. He lamented a country that “can’t stand success” and cowed before “the tyranny of the fringe”: those who believe that “every white person is a racist,” that anyone concerned with youth gender identity “is a hateful transphobe,” that every gun owner “is an advocate of violence.”
He referred to “cancel culture,” or variations of it, nearly four dozen times.
Dr Phil enlisted Jeff Nussbaum, a longtime speechwriter for former President Joe Biden, as a Democratic foil.
“I took pride in being a sparring partner,” Nussbaum said, “though recent events seem to show that either I lost or he moved to a different ring.”
In June 2024, Merit Street Media secured a major get: the presumptive Republican nominee, hosting Dr Phil at Mar-a-Lago.
“You’ve always been very special,” Trump told him.
Dr Phil urged Trump against governing vengefully if elected. (Asked in our interview if the president listened, Dr Phil said, “I mean, he hasn’t locked anybody up.” The same day, Trump baselessly accused former President Barack Obama of treason and said it was “time to go after people.”)
But with an online audience of millions, the sit-down fulfilled an early Merit aspiration: demonstrating Dr Phil’s range.
“Phil has an intuitive ability to read the national culture,” said Ken Solomon, a longtime friend and tennis partner who became Merit TV’s CEO.
The Professional Bull Riders league signed on. Executives outlined plans to reach more than 100 million homes, even as some in Dr Phil’s orbit clocked the overstuffed media landscape.
Merit recruited a team of more than 100 to the Fort Worth, Texas, area to work from its 5-acre studio. His stated goal was to “own the debate lane.”
But quickly, employees said, the preferred contours of that debate became clear. Guest bookings tilted decidedly right. Dr Phil warned viewers that “illegal immigrants are fueling crime across America.” He enthused over what he considered agreeable conditions for immigrant detainees. “You said there are even exercise classes for the women,” he nudged Homan amid raids in Los Angeles.
Activists scorned him as a tool of the state.
“When you are riding along with the government, they are putting you on a publicity tour,” Alida Garcia, an organiser and former immigration official under Biden, said in an interview. “He is participating as basically a propaganda machine for Ice.”
Merit’s ratings placed the network fathoms behind not only established competitors like Fox News but also relative upstarts like Newsmax and NewsNation. (Dr Phil’s team insists Merit was gathering momentum, citing encouraging viewership figures on Inauguration Day.)
Some employees had hoped that Trump’s return, and his nominal closeness with Dr Phil, might boost the business.
In March, Merit occupied the “new media” seat in the White House briefing room. In May, the president praised Dr Phil and Merit from the Rose Garden. (Dr Phil attended in his capacity as an appointee to a federal committee on religious liberty.)
But the company was wobbling. Last month, Merit filed for bankruptcy and accused its partner, Trinity Broadcasting Network, of reneging on commitments. (Trinity did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
Professional Bull Riders, moving to recoup roughly US$180 million ($303m) from its media rights deal, has also joined the legal morass. Merit has filed counterclaims.
None of this has stopped Dr Phil from announcing a breakaway venture, Envoy Media, for which loyalists are preparing a new studio space in Irving, Texas.
In our interview, Dr Phil hailed Envoy’s “disruptive” potential, sprinkling in buzz-phrases like “citizen journalism platform” and “interactive app.”
Retirement does not appear to have occurred to him.
“This is not what I do. It’s who I am,” he said.
While some Democrats have accused Dr Phil of pandering, many of his present views appear sincerely felt. He is, friends noted, an affluent septuagenarian Texan whose beliefs broadly reflect his peer group’s.
In one recent video, Dr Phil covered what he saw as an outsize backlash against another Texan, Beyoncé, for wearing a shirt considered insensitive to Native Americans.
When, he wondered, did intentions stop mattering? What happened to critical thinking?
“Hell hath no fury,” he told viewers, “like the woke left finding a new celebrity to cancel.”
As we sat in his home office, I asked if he ever felt as if the line applied to him.
He almost smirked.
“Yeah.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Matt Flegenheimer
Photographs by: Jake Dockins, Pete Marovich, Kenny Holston and Eric Lee
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