Trump’s supposedly big Dr Phil interview was just a deluded rally with a one-person audience

News Analysis: The former president takes his act to a more intimate setting, only to see it fall flat

(Dr. Phil’s Merit Street)

In the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris took up the banner against Donald Trump, lots of ink has been spilt on the massive crowds she has been attracting and how they compare unfavorably to those at Trump’s signature political rallies.

Trump, who has always been obsessed with crowd sizes, did something unexpected in response. He reduced the crowd at his most recent event to an audience of one.

Sure, the ex-president’s Tuesday night sitdown with erstwhile syndicated network star Phil McGraw (aka “Dr Phil”) was billed as a blockbuster interview. It was said that it would cover the state of the 2024 race and Trump’s recent endorsement by conspiracy theorist nepobaby Robert F Kennedy Jr. In McGraw’s words, Dr Phil intended to “ask [Trump] some hard questions and get some clear answers.”

But predictably, nothing of the sort happened. And the program that aired on McGraw’s little-watched Merit Street streaming service didn’t flow like an interview at all.

McGraw opened the program by noting that it’s been roughly two months since a man tried to kill Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He asked the ex-president whether he’d reflected on how he’d survived the assassination attempt.

What followed was less a cogent answer as much as it was a 20-plus minute rant. During that rant, Trump repeated parts of his standard rally speech about the immigration-related chart that caused him to turn his head at the moment the would-be assassin pulled the trigger of his AR-style rifle.

McGraw — who once hosted an incredibly popular TV show in which he purported to offer life coaching and advice — didn’t follow up on Trump’s answers in any sort of probing way one would expect from a trained psychologist, much less a veteran television presenter. Instead, the former therapist (he relinquished his license to practice nearly two decades ago) responded to Trump’s recollections with the sort of sycophantic interjections more typical of a QAnon follower.

By asking Trump if he felt there’s a “reason” he survived the shooting, he gave the former president a chance to explicitly state that he is God’s anointed candidate for the presidency.

“The only thing I can think is that God loves our country, and he thinks we're going to bring our country back. He wants to bring it back,” Trump said.

It got even weirder from there.

McGraw prompted the ex-president to suggest that, were he to win the 2024 race he’s now running against Harris, it would be prima facie evidence that the Almighty wants “to be involved in saving — and maybe it's more than saving the nation — maybe it's saving the world.”

It wasn’t long before Trump was invoking religious themes once more, this time in support of what can only be described as an outright delusion regarding his popularity in California, a state that hasn’t given its electoral votes to a Republican since George HW Bush carried the state in 1988.

He claimed there is “no way” he’d lose the Golden State except if unspecified fraud and Democratic “ballot harvesting” techniques occurred.

“I guarantee if Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California,” he said.

McGraw, who was once a relatively mainstream — even milquetoast — celebrity with a prominent place in popular culture, has been reinventing himself as a MAGA-adjacent figure recently. He has now provided a space space for Trump on two separate occasions since the attempted assassination of the 45th president.

The size of Kamala Harris’s crowds have clearly been triggering to Trump (AP)

But Trump, who is trailing Harris in most opinion polls and has struggled in recent weeks to gain any traction in his messaging attempts, doesn’t seem to know what to do with that safe space. His default response was once to go bigger — more rallies, bigger venues, hit the road and stay there.

Now, with Harris in command of the Democratic Party and drawing crowds that are outpacing his, the ex-president doesn’t appear to have the energy to match her intensity or to fire up his supporters in the way he once did.

The man who once inspired the worst attack on the Capitol since British troops set it ablaze during the War of 1812 has been reduced to pontificating before a former television psychologist.

But if he wants to win, maybe a real psychologist would be more effective.