Oprah Winfrey helped transform Dr. Phil McGraw and Mehmet Oz from little-known experts into two of television’s most recognizable personalities.
Now, decades after placing them before her enormous national audience, the media mogul is making one thing unmistakably clear: Their controversial journeys into Donald Trump’s political orbit have nothing to do with her.
“People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz because of their politics or their views,” Winfrey said in a new interview with Emmy Magazine.
Then came the line that placed an extraordinary distance between the woman who launched them and the men they eventually became.
“Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me,” she said. “And I don’t have one thing to do with them.”
The declaration marked a striking public separation from two former protégés whose television careers grew directly from appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Follow @allchronologyMcGraw first entered Winfrey’s world during her highly publicized legal battle with Texas cattle ranchers in the late 1990s. His work advising her during the case made a lasting impression, and she subsequently introduced him to millions of viewers.
His plainspoken style and confrontational approach proved enormously popular. “Dr. Phil” premiered in 2002 and became a daytime television institution.
Oz followed a few years later.
After being introduced to the television doctor through her friend Gayle King, Winfrey featured Oz as a medical expert beginning in 2004. His appearances eventually led to “The Dr. Oz Show,” which premiered in 2009 and turned the cardiothoracic surgeon into a household name.
Both spinoffs survived beyond the 2011 conclusion of Winfrey’s own legendary daytime program.
But their paths have since taken a dramatic political turn.
McGraw accompanied federal immigration agents during a Chicago operation and later received an appointment to Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. His increasingly friendly relationship with Trump and other conservative figures has made him a fixture in MAGA media circles.
Follow @allchronologyOz ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as a Republican in Pennsylvania before returning to Trump’s orbit. He now leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and has worked alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose positions on vaccines have generated intense controversy.
Winfrey, meanwhile, backed Kamala Harris during her presidential campaign against Trump.
That political divide has prompted critics to revisit Oprah’s role in building the enormous platforms that McGraw and Oz later carried into conservative politics.
Winfrey did not deny her role in giving them their breaks. Instead, she explained that her decisions reflected what she believed about them 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 said.
She spoke most warmly about McGraw, recalling his support during the cattle-industry lawsuit over remarks she made about beef safety. Winfrey said his grounded and relatable personality convinced her that audiences would connect with him.
Her comments suggest that she does not necessarily regret recognizing their television potential. What she rejects is the idea that she should be held responsible for every decision they made after receiving those opportunities.
Yet the controversy extends beyond ordinary political disagreement.
Follow @allchronologyMcGraw faced backlash during the COVID-19 pandemic after comparing deaths from the virus with fatalities involving automobiles, cigarettes and swimming pools while questioning the consequences of prolonged shutdowns.
His television operation has also faced lawsuits and allegations involving recommended treatment facilities, production practices and workplace culture. Allegations in civil litigation are not equivalent to established findings of wrongdoing, and McGraw’s representatives have disputed various claims made against him and his program.
Oz has undergone an equally dramatic ideological evolution.
He once supported mandatory health coverage backed by government assistance for people unable to afford insurance. As a Trump administration official, however, he has supported substantially different policies, including changes affecting a subsidy designed to limit increases in Medicare prescription-drug premiums.
He has also criticized some Medicaid recipients as unwilling to work and reversed earlier positions involving transgender youth, now describing parts of the movement as grounded in “false science.”
Those changes have allowed critics to portray Oz as abandoning earlier views while moving closer to the priorities of Trump and Kennedy.
For Winfrey, the transformation presents an uncomfortable question familiar to anyone who has helped another person attain influence: How much responsibility does a powerful gatekeeper bear for what a former protégé eventually does with that platform?
Follow @allchronologyHer answer is emphatic.
She gave McGraw and Oz opportunities because she believed they could provide useful information to her viewers. She did not, she maintains, choose their future politics, authorize their subsequent statements or accompany them into MAGA world.
The distance between them is now measured in far more than years since their final appearances together.
Winfrey helped open the doors that turned both men into stars. But she refuses to carry responsibility for where they walked afterward.
“They have their own lives,” she effectively told her critics.
And with one striking sentence—“I don’t have one thing to do with them”—Oprah publicly cut the cord connecting her legacy to two of Trump’s most prominent celebrity allies.
