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

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