The former president has tried, and failed, to have a more intimate setting.
In the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris held up a banner opposing Donald Trump, much ink has been spilled about the large crowds she drew and how they paled in comparison to those at Trump’s typical political rallies.
Trump, always obsessed with crowd size, responded with an unexpected response: He reduced the audience to one at his last event.
Of course, Tuesday night’s meeting between the former president and former syndicated network star Phil McGraw (aka “Dr. Phil”) was billed as a blockbuster interview. The paper said it would report on the state of the 2024 campaign and the recent endorsement of President Trump by conspiracy theorist and nepobabe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In Dr. McGraw’s words, Phil “Ask [Trump] the hard questions and you’ll get honest answers.”
But predictably, nothing of the sort happened. And while the segment aired on McGraw’s low-viewing streaming service Merritt Street, it was nothing like an interview.
McGraw began the segment by noting that it had been nearly two months since a man tried to kill Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He asked the former president if he’d ever thought about how he’d survived the assassination attempt.
What followed was more of a 20-minute-plus rant than a coherent answer, during which Trump repeated a segment of his usual rally speech about the immigration-related image that caused the would-be assassin to look away as he pulled the trigger of his AR-style rifle.
McGraw, who once hosted an incredibly popular TV show where he was said to have given life advice and counsel, did not respond to Trump’s responses as forcefully as one would expect from a trained psychologist, let alone a seasoned TV host. Instead, the former therapist (he gave up his license almost 20 years ago) responded to Trump’s recollections with the sort of vile heckling common to QAnon supporters.
By asking President Trump if he thought there was a “reason” he survived the shooting, Trump gave the former president an opportunity to state explicitly that he is God’s chosen candidate for president.
“The only thing I can think of is that God loves our country and believes we’re going to get our country back. He wants to get it back,” Trump said.
Things only got weirder from there.
McGraw led the former president to believe that if he won the 2024 race he’s now running against Harris, it would be clear evidence that the Almighty “wants to participate in the rescue, and maybe even step down. It’s not just saving the country, maybe it’s saving the world.”
It didn’t take long for Trump to bring up the religion issue again, this time in support of what he saw as a total delusion about his popularity in California,
He argued that it was “impossible” to lose the Golden State without some unspecified voter fraud and democratic “vote-grabbing” techniques.
“If Jesus came down and counted the votes, I guarantee you I would win California,” he said.
McGraw, once a relatively well-known, even effeminate, pop-culture star, has recently reinvented himself as a MAGA-aligned figure. He has given Trump space twice since the assassination attempt on the 45th president.
But Trump, who trails Harris in most polls and has struggled to gain support with his messaging in recent weeks, seems unsure what to do with this safe zone. Before, his default response was to do something — hold more rallies, build bigger venues, go on tours, and stay there.
Now, with Ms. Harris taking over leadership of the Democratic Party and drawing bigger crowds than he did, the former president no longer seems to have the energy to match their intensity or excite his supporters as he once did.
The man who once instigated the worst storming of the Capitol since the British arson in the War of 1812 now has to give a lecture to a former TV psychologist.
But if he wants to win, a real psychologist might be more effective.