Dr. Phil Thinks There's Plenty of Idiocy in Politics, but Doesn't Believe Trump Is Worse Than Biden
"I stayed non-political because I think there’s idiocy on both sides," Dr. Phil told Bill Maher in 2023. "I’m not a big fan of our president or the last one..."
Published Feb. 27 2024, 3:19 p.m. ET
In general, daytime talk show hosts work as hard as they can to avoid politics on their shows and in their lives. They do this at least in part because getting political would likely alienate part of their audience, and they want to make sure that they're reaching as many people as possible.
That's why, even though he's been in the public eye on television every day for years, it can be a little bit difficult to suss out exactly what Dr. Phil McGraw's politics might be. Here's what we know about the daytime talk show host and his political views.
Which political party does Dr. Phil support?
In part because he's been on TV for years, Dr. Phil has tended to keep his political views relatively quiet. What seems clear, though, is that he is on the right-leaning part of the spectrum.
During an appearance on Bill Maher's podcast in 2023, Bill and Phil argued about whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump had been worse for America, with Phil refusing to agree with Maher that it was Trump.
"Well, I’m concerned about both sides. And I’m particularly concerned about this woke agenda that’s being pushed," Phil explained.
Bill Maher is certainly no fan of "the woke agenda," but he did want to emphasize that Biden had been a return to normalcy after four years of Trump.
“It’s not politics that determine the outcome of society, it’s culture,” Phil countered. “I don’t care about politics. You go back to the beginning… Democrats and Republicans have been in control about 50-50."
"They’ve had control of the House and Senate while they were in control the presidency about 50-50, they’ve had it not in control 50-50," Phil continued. "And look where we are. They both come up about the same place. I don’t care about that. I care about our culture.”
Although Bill kept pressing the point, Phil refused to budge, saying that it didn't matter because Trump wasn't currently in power and he didn't think he would be again.
Dr. Phil argued with 'The View' over COVID school closures.
More recently, we got another insight into Phil's politics after he got into an argument with the hosts of The View over whether it made sense to close schools during the earliest days of COVID.
He discussed the decline of mental health among children in recent years, and suggested that school closures were a mistake because they contributed to that decline.
"In, like, ’08, ’09, smartphones came on, and kids started, they stopped living their lives and starting watching people live their lives, and so we saw the biggest spike and the highest levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidality, since records have ever been kept, and it’s just continued on and on and on," he said.
He continued: "And then COVID hits 10 years later, and the same agencies that knew that, are the agencies that shut down the schools for two years."
The show's host were quick to interrupt him, pointing out that those schools were closed because they wanted to save lives.
While that may not have been an explicitly political position, it certainly seemed to align with many on the right who were skeptical of school closures. While Phil hasn't always said much about politics, many have taken the comments he has made and extrapolated from there.
