Dr. Phil McGraw’s choice to align himself with President Donald Trump has backfired for his companies, which are reportedly near “total collapse.”
McGraw became a firsthand witness to ICE raids, attended RFK Jr.’s swearing-in, appeared with Trump after the Texas flooding, and is leading the White House’s new Religious Liberty Commission.
However, his right wing Merit Street Media, launched in 2024, has experienced multiple setbacks, notes Slate:
McGraw’s post–Dr. Phil venture, Merit Street Media, went on a “summer hiatus” and laid off dozens of staffers just before it was scheduled to air McGraw’s on-the-ground dispatches of the Chicago ICE raids. The short-lived media enterprise was supposed to help transition McGraw from the traditional TV age to the new-media economy. Instead, the little-viewed Merit Street Media is now locked in bankruptcy proceedings and in an expensive legal battle with its distributor, Trinity Broadcasting Network, as McGraw attempts to launch yet another media startup, Envoy…
In August 2024, Merit Street laid off dozens of employees, the bulk of them staffers for the Morning and News shows. “Some people uprooted their entire lives to move here for this job without a safety net,” one employee told Mediaite. “Those left are being told very little.”
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the employees were laid off right as “a large buffet” was being set up at the office for guests of an upcoming Primetime roundtable that featured Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Not long after Trump’s Election Day victory, the longtime local-TV fixture and Morning on Merit Street co-anchor Dominique Sachse announced her departure from the show, writing on social media that she would “pivot” back to hosting her own YouTube channel…
Following that, the Professional Bull Riders league declared on Instagram that it had “parted ways” with Merit Street, just four months after finalizing their broadcasting partnership in July. “They breached our contract by failing to pay rights fees owed” amounting up to $3.5 million, the Fort Worth–based organization explained. (Merit stated to the Dallas-based WFAA station that the dispute was being ironed out in a “confidential proceeding” and claimed to be “surprised” by the league’s accusations “when the facts are in dispute.”)…
In the early months of 2025, Merit took a Hail Mary approach to keeping itself afloat: expanding into Canada, reportedly staging a fake production set in order to impress potential investors, pulling old Dr. Phil reruns from CBS syndication and exclusively housing them in Merit’s library, promoting Ken Solomon as president and CEO, taking a multimillion-dollar loan from McGraw’s own Peteski Productions firm (the longtime home of the OG Dr. Phil), and adding a suite of new podcasts mostly hosted by McGraw himself—one of which merely served as recaps of DOGE’s federal slashing.
There was a common theme across these decisions: The audience metrics were not looking good for any segment of Merit’s output, digital included. Per the Hollywood Reporter, Merit’s measly weekly viewer numbers soon winnowed down further, to 17,000.
A total collapse finally kicked off this summer.
In late June, Dr. Phil Primetime went on another “summer hiatus,” and 40 more Merit Street Media staffers were laid off. On July 2, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy—and sued Trinity Broadcasting, claiming that the distributor caused Merit to “lose its national distribution by withholding payments,” forcing McGraw’s network to seek third-party distributors and putting it on the hook for nearly $100 million.
The lawsuit also pinned blame for Merit’s janky operations on Trinity, which allegedly provided malfunctioning studio tech and failed to offer timely repairs.
To cap it all off, the bankruptcy led Merit to purge much of the remaining staff, leaving six people behind and crushing all new production. Insofar as Merit TV still exists, it’s as a ghost channel of Dr. Phil reruns.
Trinity disputed Merit’s claims in an early-July court hearing, stating that the broadcaster splurged $130 million on the company only for McGraw to underperform his quota. (Trinity has deleted its original blog post celebrating the union with Dr. Phil.)
Not even two weeks after declaring bankruptcy, McGraw made a surprising announcement: He was launching a new entertainment firm called Envoy Media Company, in partnership with Steve Harvey, that would take a more digital, immersive focus, launching a special app with the ability for “citizen journalists” to upload their own stuff alongside McGraw-approved programming.*
Harvey may have been happy with this arrangement, but Merit’s other ex-affiliates certainly weren’t. In early August, Professional Bull Riders objected to the bankruptcy in court and cited Envoy in accusing Dr. Phil of “orchestrating” the Chapter 11 motion to avoid paying debts.
Just days after, Trinity filed a federal countersuit against Peteski and McGraw, accusing the latter of defrauding the Christian empire throughout the relationship: fudging key stats about his entertainment portfolio, reneging on promises to produce 90-minute episodes, and filing for bankruptcy without Trinity’s approval as a key creditor. (Dr. Phil’s lawyers called these allegations “provable lies.”)
…While keeping a more low-key public profile, the 75-year-old Dr. Phil persists, striking a new deal between Envoy and Charter Communications while opining on current events through his podcasts—which are not commanding the attention that Dr. Phil and Dr. Phil used to see.