This op-ed was published by The National on June 14, 2024
Former president and convicted felon Donald Trump got a surprise boost in a strange and fawning interview with TV psychologist Phillip McGraw. Dr Phil had a very popular and long-running network TV show that recently moved to his own fledgling channel. He did his best to help Mr. Trump spread conspiracy theories to soften the blow of his recent 34 felony count conviction in New York and promote distrust of the judicial system.
The TV psychologist sagely shook his head as the former president vented against the endless conspiracies that “they” have launched against him from the beginning of his political career. Dr McGraw never challenged Mr. Trump’s falsehoods. Indeed, he endorsed many of the worst of them either through obvious body language or open agreement.
Dr McGraw floated a bizarre legal theory that it was improper for Mr. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen to testify because he had taken a plea deal in a prosecution on separate charges arising from the same payoff to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He suggested that there was something unusual about those who have already pled guilty testifying against those who allegedly caused them to break the law.
Such testimonies, are however, a cornerstone of American law enforcement against unlawful conspiracies, particularly organized crime, and above all the Mafia. It’s normal and typical. Yet Dr McGraw claimed such testimony is unduly prejudicial to the defendant. In so doing, he’s condemning many hundreds of the most important organized crime and racketeering prosecutions over the past century.
Even more telling was what Dr McGraw didn’t ask Mr. Trump. He developed a reputation as a no-nonsense TV host who would not allow guests to obfuscate by denying the written record of a case, such as police reports and, especially, jury verdicts, with vapid and groundless conspiratorial denials.
But that’s exactly what he allowed Mr. Trump to do, and encouraged his viewers to accept the former president’s baseless claims that US President Joe Biden and the Justice Department secretly control state-level prosecutions like the one in Manhattan in which Mr. Trump was recently convicted.
In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Biden, attorney general Merrick Garland, or anybody else in Washington played any role in the Manhattan case, or had any communication with the prosecutors. Instead, district attorney Alvin Bragg was authorized to bring the case forward by a grand jury, and Mr. Trump was found guilty by a jury of his peers on all 34 counts in less than two days of deliberations.
Clearly, the jury believed that Mr. Trump had a sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels, as she testified. Dr McGraw asked Mr. Trump how he felt about being persecuted, but never asked him how he felt about having cheated on his wife when she was pregnant with their child, or whether he had any regrets about the affair or the hush money payoff. Apparently that was of no interest, psychologically or socially.
Worse, he allowed Mr. Trump to insist that he had “never met” E Jean Carroll, even though two separate juries decided in civil suits that he was culpable of abuse against her, which a federal judge later ruled constituted “rape” in the commonly understood definition of the term, and that he had twice defamed her. None of that seems to have been relevant to Dr McGraw, who nodded sympathetically when Mr. Trump insisted he had “never met this woman,” despite at least one photograph of the two of them together, not to mention the outcome of the two civil suits.
In his now-defunct TV show, Dr McGraw never tired of boasting that he had spent most of his career working within the legal system as a “forensic psychologist,” specializing in jury selection. So he knows better than to pretend that these convictions and civil rulings don’t matter or are extraordinarily tainted.
And the recent conviction of Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, on paperwork-related charges regarding a gun purchase, demonstrated the absurdity of claiming that the Biden Justice Department or the courts are instruments of the President’s will. Instead it shows that prosecutions and convictions are proceeding according to law, and not personal or political corruption.
In his transition away from his TV show, Dr. McGraw began to spread his media wings by starting a podcast that began with a multi-part series on pathological narcissism. Much, and arguably most, of what he described appears precisely illustrated by Mr. Trump’s public behavior, and Dr McGraw is no doubt aware of that. Ignoring this and instead allowing his audience to buy into Mr. Trump’s self-serving lies and distortions about his political travails (including demonstrably false claims about a “stolen election” in 2020) and legal crises does a cynical disservice to his audience.
But Dr. McGraw is familiar with strategic dissembling. One of the hallmarks of his show was the constant and adoring presence of his wife, Robin, and never-ending references to their decades of wedded bliss. His show would routinely reserve the last quarter hour to infomercials about her latest skincare or other products aimed at his largely female audience.
Unmentioned to the point of deception was that Robin is Dr Phil’s second wife, and that his first marriage to Debbie Higgins McCall ended with her divorcing him for alleged infidelity. But, to his largely female TV fanbase, he was the ideal husband of the adoring Robin, with the couple typically walking offstage hand-in-hand at the end of each episode.
Dr McGraw didn’t afford quite that level of affection to Mr. Trump, but he not only never challenged him with the facts adjudicated in several recent cases that the former president had an affair with an adult movie star while his wife was pregnant, that he sexually abused and defamed a noted columnist, and has been a serial fraudster and tax evader.
Instead, Dr McGraw endorsed, either overtly or implicitly, Mr. Trump’s baseless and paranoid conspiracy theories about being unfairly persecuted, and buttressed that with misinterpretations of the rules of evidence and standards of prejudicial material in order to suggest that Mr. Trump’s recent conviction was somehow tainted.
The two former television celebrities bonded so tightly over conspiratorial and legally unsound theories that it’s likely to be one of Mr. Trump’s most supportive media appearances between now and the election. But recent polls show Mr. Biden already drawing even with him, rather sooner than I would’ve expected, and it’s hard to see momentum shifting back to the former president. To win, Mr. Trump is going to need a lot more than this kind of intellectually and psychologically dishonest boost from the likes of Dr Phil.