Melania Trump Pushes Senate Candidacy Of Dr. Mehmet Oz

Trading his talk show forum for a different kind of stage, Dr. Mehmet Oz made the surprising announcement in November 2021 that he was entering politics. He has the support of the ultimate insider: former first lady Melania Trump, according to sources familiar with her views on the race.

“The first lady has let the president know that she likes Dr. Oz. And that matters,” said a top Republican familiar with the conversation inside Trump’s orbit at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach.

Dr. Oz is running for the one open U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. Calling America a sick patient in need of “a defibrillator to shock it back to life,” as his website puts it, the celebrity surgeon hopes that Keystone State voters will see him as part of the cure. He has come down especially hard on the government’s response to Covid-19, speaking out against vaccine mandates and mask-wearing in schools while promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus.

Oz’s main opponent in the Senate primary, former hedge fund executive David McCormick, has a bevy of Trump advisers and influential figures working in his campaign and super PAC, starting with his wife, Dina Powell, who served as a deputy national security adviser to the former president. Trump adviser and 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway serves on McCormick’s super PAC and former campaign operative Andy Surabian. Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and former White House adviser Tony Sayegh also back McCormick.