Trump and Dr. Phil appeared together during the National Day of Prayer at the White House on May 1.Molly Riley/The White House/ZUMA
Dr. Phil McGraw, the daytime television psychologist-turned-Trump surrogate, really wants you to believe a ludicrous claim: He is just not that into politics.
“I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about politics,” he told the New York Times, in a new profile published on Sunday.
This is absurd.
As my colleagues Inae Oh and Isabela Dias have written, Dr. Phil has helped the Trump administration sell its mass deportations by making televised content out of their raids. As the Trump administration uses cruelty—and publicizes it—to push for self-deportation, Dr. Phil’s broadcasts are important.
As Isabela documented in January, the daytime host has gone along with ICE raids, in faux-documentary style reports, often parrotting government talking points without investigation. “This truly is a targeted ICE mission,” McGraw tells viewers, “they’re not sweeping neighborhoods like people are trying to imply.” The truth? That day, ICE arrested 1,179 people nationwide, according to NBC News, just half of whom were deemed “criminal arrests.”
A month before the raid, McGraw reportedly brokered a friendly meeting between Homan and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, after which Adams announced he would alter sanctuary city laws; this allowed local law enforcement to work more closely with the federal government on immigration enforcement.
And as my colleague Mark Follman has written, McGraw also lent credence to Trump’s baseless claims that former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris somehow benefited from his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year. (“I’m not saying they wanted you to get shot,” McGraw said in that interview, “but do you think it was OK with them if you did?”) More recently, McGraw appeared alongside Trump in Texas, in the wake of last month’s tragic floods that killed more than 130 people, including more than two dozen kids and counselors at a summer camp; Trump also appointed McGraw to a (so-called) Religious Liberty Commission.
Despite all this, McGraw refused to tell the Times whether or not he voted for the current president. (“When people ask me about that, I ask them if they’ve listened to what I said,” he said. “Did you?”) McGraw also claimed that, despite his appearance at last fall’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, he would have appeared at a rally with Harris, the Democratic nominee, but that her team stopped following up with him in the midst of discussions. (Harris’s spokespeople told the newspaper they were not aware of any such conversations.)
The main thing that the host’s non-answers shine a light on is how sensitive he seems to be to criticism about his support for Trump’s policies.
This past week, when Bill Maher confronted McGraw about why he joined ICE raids, he claimed that it was “bullshit” that he, or ICE, were responsible for “separating families.”
But the Trump administration has continued to separate families.
And as Alida Garcia, an organizer and former immigration official under Biden, told the Times: “When you are riding along with the government, they are putting you on a publicity tour. He is participating as basically a propaganda machine for ICE.”
