Oprah Winfrey has finally addressed the two problematic and Trump-friendly `doctors’ she made famous through her wildly popular TV show.
The talk show host, now 72, introduced Dr. Phil McGraw as a regular weekly expert and relationship strategist on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988. Dr. Mehmet Oz first appeared on Winfrey’s show in 2004.
After initially launching in 1986, Winfrey’s show ended in 2011. By that time, both McGraw, 75, and Oz, 66, had become incredibly famous. The spin-off advice show Dr. Phil began in 2002, while Winfrey’s production team launched The Dr. Oz Show in 2009.
However, both television doctors are now closely aligned with President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, with McGraw even accompanying ICE agents to a raid in Chicago in June 2025 “to get a first-hand look at the targeted operations,” according to his conservative TV channel, MeritTV.
McGraw was appointed by Trump to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission in May last year. While he holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, he is not a licensed therapist.
Despite a history of promoting pseudoscience and unproven medical treatments, Oz was appointed to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2025, and has regularly appeared with and supported Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic.
In a new interview with Emmy Magazine about building her “empire,” Winfrey was asked how she feels now about platforming both men.
“People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, because of their politics or their views,” Winfrey said.
“Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them,” she said.
“At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me.”
In the new interview, Winfrey praised Dr. Phil supporting her during a 1998 lawsuit where Texas cattlemen sued her for defaming the beef industry.
“He was so practical, so down to earth, so real,” she said, adding she thought he could help a lot of people, so invited her onto her show.
Winfrey said her best friend Gayle King introduced her to Dr. Oz. King and Winfrey were guests at Trump ally Jeff Bezos’ wedding in June last year.
“He explained practical things like colon cancer and bowel movements,” Winfrey said of Dr. Oz. “I thought he had the language for explaining medical things in a way that was helpful to me. I thought it would be helpful to many other people. And that is how they ended up on the show.”
While Winfrey was friendly with Trump before his political career, she publicly endorsed and campaigned for his opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, during the 2024 presidential election, delivering a prominent speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Trump appeared on The Dr. Oz Show in September 2016, during his presidential campaign. While Oz had initially promised to ask Trump about his health, he backtracked, saying he would not ask him “questions he doesn’t want to have answered.”
When Trump became president for the first time, Oz was appointed to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition in 2018.
Oz has also reversed his stance on several key issues after going MAGA. In 2009, he said healthcare should be “mandatory” to everybody in America, saying, “If you can’t afford it, we have to give it to you.”
In his role in the new Trump administration, last month Oz announced the government was axing a subsidy program that kept premiums for the Medicare prescription benefit under control.
Last year, Oz claimed Medicaid was going to TV addicts.
“If you sit at home as an able-bodied person on Medicaid—and on average you will watch 6.1 hours of television or leisure time at home—you actually don’t want that,” Oz said. “Opiate use rates skyrocket. People don’t want to sit at home doing nothing. They want to have opportunities.
After previously supporting transgender youth on his TV show in 2010, in May 2022 Oz said a transgender youth movement is based on “false science.”
McGraw’s career has been surrounded by controversies, including visiting Britney Spears in January 2008 after she had been hospitalized after a mental breakdown.
He later made public statements about the visit that alienated Spears’ family and left them chastising him for betraying their trust. A planned episode of his TV show, which would have cashed in on the interest around her mental health, was axed.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, McGraw caught flack for suggesting social distancing was unnecessary.
“The fact of the matter is we have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that,” McGraw said on Laura Ingraham’s The Ingraham Angle. “But yet we are doing it for this and the fallout is going to last for years because people’s lives are being destroyed.”
His TV show also caused problems. In 2021, a woman alleged she was sexually assaulted at a ranch in Utah and sued McGraw and ViacomCBS for negligence. McGraw had suggested she be sent there during an episode of Dr. Phil.
In another lawsuit, Shirley Rae Dieu alleged that during a taping session at the Dr. Phil House for an episode that eventually aired in 2007, she had been held against her will and “forced to be in the same room with a completely live naked man while he exposed his entire naked body, genitals and all.”
“All of Shirley Rae Dieu’s claims are without merit,” Dr. Phil’s lawyers responded in a statement. “Once Ms. Dieu expressed her discomfort, and producers ascertained there was nothing they could do to help her, they called a car service to return her to her home.”
There were also allegations from former staff of McGraw’s show fostering a toxic and hostile workplace.
In 2022, BuzzFeed spoke to former Dr. Phil employees who said they’d experienced a miserable work environment where they were encouraged to inflate onscreen racist stereotypes. They claimed that one guest was not properly medicated before her appearance to make her appear unstable. McGraw’s personal attorney refuted the claims, dismissing them as clickbait.
The Daily Beast has contacted reps for McGraw and Oz for comment.
