Oprah Winfrey has addressed her part in platforming the careers of pro-Trump doctors Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz on her titular talk show.
Winfrey’s The Oprah Winfrey Show show aired from 1986-2011. She introduced McGraw — who is no longer a licensed psychologist after letting his license lapse two decades ago — as a weekly expert and relationship strategist in 1998. Oz, who holds medical and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, began appearing on the program as a medical expert in 2004.
Both TV doctors have since become allies of President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.
McGraw, AKA Dr. Phil, serves on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission and promotes MAGA initiatives through his conservative cable network Merit Street Media and accompanied ICE agents to a raid in Chicago with his TV network in June 2025 for a “first-hand look at the target operations.”
Oz was appointed to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2025, and has consistently supported Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
In a new interview with Emmy Magazine, Winfrey admitted that she faces criticism for having platformed the pair because of their current political views, but was defensive about why she chose them to join her show in the first place.
“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,” she continued.
Winfrey praised McGraw for supporting her during a 1997 lawsuit, where she was sued by a group of Texas cattlemen for defaming the beef industry. She won the case in February 1998.
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“He was so practical, so down to earth, so real,” she said of McGraw. “He would ride in the car with me every morning on the way to trial, where I’m literally sitting on trial for six weeks.”
Winfrey said her best friend Gayle King introduced her to Oz.
“He explained practical things like colon cancer and bowel movements,” Winfrey said. “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 and Trump were on friendly terms before he became president, she publicly endorsed Kamala Harris during the 2024 election and delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Both McGraw and Oz’s medical expertise has been scrutinized by health professionals over the years.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, McGraw faced backlash for suggesting social distancing was unnecessary and sharing inaccurate statistics about non-contagious causes of death.
“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.
McGraw has previously said he sends a letter to Winfrey each year to express his gratitude for their friendship and how it changed his life.
“Oprah and I met in the late ‘90s when she was on trial, and I was on the trial team, then I started doing the show, and started doing the show a lot,” he said on The Kelly Clarkson Show in 2022. “And then we launched the [Dr. Phil] show, and it really changed my life a lot.”
“I had a great life when I met her, and I’ve got a great life now, but she changed a lot of things,” he said.