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Phil “Dr. Phil” McGraw has earned himself a star position in this game-show-host presidency.
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the ex-psychologist has stationed himself within the White House’s content-creation apparatus, as both a firsthand witness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and as a sneering critic of the Americans protesting Israel’s mass bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Unlike fellow Oprah-endorsed TV personality Mehmet Oz, McGraw doesn’t have a Cabinet position, but he’s been an active, ever-present volunteer for the chief executive: attending RFK Jr.’s swearing-in, brokering the partnership between ICE and New York City’s mayor, leading the White House’s new Religious Liberty Commission, appearing with the president after the devastating Texas flooding. It feels less like public service than a promotional gambit for McGraw, who’s been spotlighting such events and government friends on Dr. Phil Primetime, which is broadcast on his self-helmed right-wing network, Merit TV.

At least, it was broadcast there until June, when McGraw’s post–Dr. Phil venture, Merit Street Media, went on a “summer hiatus” and laid off dozens of staffers just before it was scheduled to air McGraw’s on-the-ground dispatches of the Chicago ICE raids. The short-lived media enterprise was supposed to help transition McGraw from the traditional TV age to the new-media economy. Instead, the little-viewed Merit Street Media is now locked in bankruptcy proceedings and in an expensive legal battle with its distributor, Trinity Broadcasting Network, as McGraw attempts to launch yet another media startup, Envoy. 2025 could have been Dr. Phil’s best and most lucrative year, the one where he finally transcended the talk-show doldrums through a dynamic self-controlled network catapulting off the MAGA cultural shift. How did it all crash so hard, so soon?

When McGraw signed off from his highly rated talk show in 2023—following a spate of controversies around Dr. Phil’s allegedly exploitative treatment of its guests and employees—it was in the midst of an absolute rout for daytime TV. Throughout the previous year, once indispensable working-day hosts like Ellen DeGeneres, Maury Povich, Wendy Williams, and Dr.
Oz all bid goodbye to their time slots, either to retire or to seek other career paths. McGraw, meanwhile, was shifting his ubiquitous mustache from the daytime circuit to the prime-time rat race, telling Deadline in 2023 that he was “compelled to engage with a broader audience because I have grave concerns for the American family, and I am determined to help restore a clarity of purpose as well as our core values.”

In November 2023, when McGraw announced the formation of Merit Street Media, it all appeared to be rather similar to the industry he’d just left behind, the only real changes being that McGraw owned a small stake in this company and was broadcasting a new self-branded show, Dr. Phil Primetime, at niiiiiight. The promo copy, however, was far more clarifying.
“American families and our core values are under attack,” McGraw declared in the press release. “Together we are going to stand strong and fight for the very soul and sanity of America and get things that matter back on track.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking this was a political campaign launch and not publicity for a new TV network, especially when the inspiration behind the name “Merit Street Media” was laid out. “I chose ‘Merit’ to honor the meritocracy upon which our amazing country was built, and ‘Street’ to represent ‘Main Street’ America,” McGraw wrote on his website, adding that the company would be headquartered at a “brand-new, state-of-the-art broadcast center” in his home state of Texas—in effect, taking the red-pilled-tech-bro path of forcing his most loyal Dr. Phil producers to move from Hollywood to Dallas–Fort Worth with their families. A free streaming app, Merit+, was also included with the package when Dr. Phil Primetime made it to the air on April 2, 2024, when Merit Street Media fully launched in partnership with the religious network and TV-station owner Trinity Broadcasting.

The problems arose almost immediately. Dr. Phil, who’d maintained millions of devoted fans up until his digital transition, had trouble engendering an equivalent interest in Primetime, The News on Merit Street, or even the Morning on Merit Street segments where he promised to take on “Culture War BULL CRAP.” Syndicated titles from other TV legends of yore (e.g., Merit investor Steve Harvey) also failed to attract eyeballs. While McGraw himself could manufacture some hype through amply promoted sit-downs with high-profile interviewees—Donald Trump, RFK Jr., Benjamin Netanyahu, a 13-year-old who was “CANCELED” by his school—the viral moments didn’t do much to help Merit TV. In August 2024, Merit Street laid off dozens of employees, the bulk of them staffers for the Morning and News shows. “Some people uprooted their entire lives to move here for this job without a safety net,” one employee told Mediaite. “Those left are being told very little.” According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the employees were laid off right as “a large buffet” was being set up at the office for guests of an upcoming Primetime roundtable that featured Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Not even six months into its life span, Merit Street was already looking chaotic behind the scenes and earning a less-than-stellar reputation: The notoriously conservative Sinclair Broadcasting Group soon axed the Tennis Channel’s longtime chairman and CEO, Ken Solomon, explicitly because of his simultaneous involvement with Merit Street as board member and adviser. McGraw pressed on over the fracas, even shouting out Merit Street during his fawning address at Trump’s infamous Madison Square Garden rally.

Yet the news didn’t improve: Not long after Trump’s Election Day victory, the longtime local-TV fixture and Morning on Merit Street co-anchor Dominique Sachse announced her departure from the show, writing on social media that she would “pivot” back to hosting her own YouTube channel. (In a follow-up interview with her social media manager Courtney Young, who’d voluntarily left Merit over the summer, Sachse noted that the two had overworked themselves during their brief time at Merit, and that she preferred to do “unbiased” work anyway.)

Following that, the Professional Bull Riders league declared on Instagram that it had “parted ways” with Merit Street, just four months after finalizing their broadcasting partnership in July. “They breached our contract by failing to pay rights fees owed” amounting up to $3.5 million, the Fort Worth–based organization explained. (Merit stated to the Dallas-based WFAA station that the dispute was being ironed out in a “confidential proceeding” and claimed to be “surprised” by the league’s accusations “when the facts are in dispute.”) In an end-of-year chart, Variety reported that Merit Street, whose flagship channel had by then rebranded to Merit TV, averaged only 27,000 weekly viewers—lagging far behind the Oprah Winfrey Network (average 107,000 weekly viewers).

As Trump returned to office, Dr. Phil’s highly publicized presidential friendship served to obscure further troubles in his business. In the early months of 2025, Merit took a Hail Mary approach to keeping itself afloat: expanding into Canada, reportedly staging a fake production set in order to impress potential investors, pulling old Dr. Phil reruns from CBS syndication and exclusively housing them in Merit’s library, promoting Ken Solomon as president and CEO, taking a multimillion-dollar loan from McGraw’s own Peteski Productions firm (the longtime home of the OG Dr. Phil), and adding a suite of new podcasts mostly hosted by McGraw himself—one of which merely served as recaps of DOGE’s federal slashing.

There was a common theme across these decisions: The audience metrics were not looking good for any segment of Merit’s output, digital included. Per the Hollywood Reporter, Merit’s measly weekly viewer numbers soon winnowed down further, to 17,000.

A total collapse finally kicked off this summer. In late June, Dr. Phil Primetime went on another “summer hiatus,” and 40 more Merit Street Media staffers were laid off. On July 2, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy—and sued Trinity Broadcasting, claiming that the distributor caused Merit to “lose its national distribution by withholding payments,” forcing McGraw’s network to seek third-party distributors and putting it on the hook for nearly $100 million. The lawsuit also pinned blame for Merit’s janky operations on Trinity, which allegedly provided malfunctioning studio tech and failed to offer timely repairs.

To cap it all off, the bankruptcy led Merit to purge much of the remaining staff, leaving six people behind and crushing all new production. Insofar as Merit TV still exists, it’s as a ghost channel of Dr. Phil reruns. Trinity disputed Merit’s claims in an early-July court hearing, stating that the broadcaster splurged $130 million on the company only for McGraw to underperform his quota. (Trinity has deleted its original blog post celebrating the union with Dr. Phil.)

Not even two weeks after declaring bankruptcy, McGraw made a surprising announcement: He was launching a new entertainment firm called Envoy Media Company, in partnership with Steve Harvey, that would operate out of Merit Street HQ and take a more digital, immersive focus, launching a special app that would allow “citizen journalists” to upload their own stuff alongside McGraw-approved programming.

Harvey may have been happy with this arrangement, but Merit’s other ex-affiliates certainly weren’t. In early August, Professional Bull Riders objected to the bankruptcy in court and cited Envoy in accusing Dr. Phil of “orchestrating” the Chapter 11 motion to avoid paying debts. Just days after, Trinity filed a federal countersuit against Peteski and McGraw, accusing the latter of defrauding the Christian empire throughout the relationship: fudging key stats about his entertainment portfolio, reneging on promises to produce 90-minute episodes, and filing for bankruptcy without Trinity’s approval as a key creditor. (Dr. Phil’s lawyers called these allegations “provable lies.”)

Unfortunately for McGraw, the Trump administration also pushed back. When Merit proposed taking another multimillion-dollar loan from Peteski—just weeks after paying off ex-Merit employees with Peteski-provided cash—the Justice Department’s bankruptcy unit asked the courts to reject this “insider” move. Nevertheless, during a Sept. 2 hearing, Merit Street gained legal approval to have Peteski cover its dues to lawyers and investors, although the financial specifics weren’t disclosed.

At the time of publication, all the suits are still being litigated. Merit continues to rely on Peteski Productions, flush with decades of syndication reserves from Dr. Phil’s peak, to placate unhappy creditors. While keeping a more low-key public profile, the 75-year-old Dr. Phil persists, striking a new deal between Envoy and Charter Communications while opining on current events through his podcasts—which are not commanding the attention that Dr. Phil and Dr. Phil used to see.

The lesson that Phil McGraw should learn from this saga is that a rush to embrace the growing right-wing media trends can’t work for everyone, even someone as famous as he. Since his ’90s-era start on Oprah’s show, McGraw’s key appeal to America lay in his mastery of a particular kind of TV that embraced the intensely personal over the intensely political; no matter how problematic Dr. Phil’s encounters and advice may have been, he had a well-honed sense for drawing out the drama of the human condition, inviting Americans to both gawk at and listen to people they may not have heard from otherwise. The fundamentals of MAGA culture, doctrinaire in nature and inflexible when it comes to Trumpist loyalty, are of a much different nature than the sideshows that kept some suburban stay-at-home moms hooked to their TVs.

McGraw insists nothing has changed; as he told the New York Times in August, “I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about politics.” But, that Times profile notes, Dr. Phil’s politics and public presence conspicuously shifted through the pandemic, transforming America’s TV doctor from a transgender-friendly, pro-immigrant, Trump-skeptical man of comity to a frothing anti–“cancel culture” pundit.

Even the “anti-woke” British outlet UnHerd noted last year that “Dr. Phil’s reinvention as a culture warrior isn’t working,” observing that the media-saturated Trump era and its nonstop outrage had rendered daytime-style provocations all but moot. Plus, there are already plenty of MAGA warriors and podcasters for diehards to follow, many of whom were with Trump from the beginning and all say the exact same things. There’s not much for audiences to gain from an ICE ride-along when its agents are stationed everywhere across America’s major cities. McGraw decries politics in one breath, then repeatedly pops up at the White House and films videos about “Cowardly Democrats” who “Spit in the Face of All Texans.” How’s that workin’ out for ya?