President Donald Trump’s pick for the nation’s next top doctor has been caught deleting posts in which she was critical of the president and his health policies.
Dr. Nicole Saphier, whom Trump has tipped to be his surgeon general, appears to have been particularly unimpressed by the president’s deeply personal and highly public spat with Elon Musk last year, according to an archived version of a now-deleted June 2025 post, first reported by CNN.
She described the men’s online exchange as “petty, loud & obnoxious,” and said it was “like watching two billionaires throw sand in a sandbox,” or “grown adults acting like toddlers in a tiara fight.”
Saphier was reportedly also highly critical of Trump’s messaging on the use of Tylenol by pregnant women, which the president has advised against based on highly contested claims about a purported link between the medication and autism in children.
“As a mom of 3 kids, I don’t love a man telling me to ‘tough it out’ when it comes to pregnancy,” she wrote. “Words matter. Facts matter too.”
She later followed up with a further post on the topic. “This isn’t the first or second time he has said this,” Saphier said. “Obviously something was said to POTUS behind closed doors and the public deserves transparency on the data presented to substantiate these statements.”
On other occasions she has taken the administration to task for failing to curb measles outbreaks in several states, warning in a post just two months before her nomination was announced that it “seems like they may not want to admit the U.S. measles elimination status is is [sic] gone until after midterm elections.”
Saphier also seems to have joined a growing chorus of voices questioning both Trump’s mental and physical health since he assumed office for the second time last year. “Lots of people questioning POTUS MRI,” she wrote of widespread speculation last October as to what exactly it was for which the president had undergone the procedure. “I have questions too.”
Saphier represents Trump’s third pick for surgeon general during his second term. The White House withdrew its prior nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a former Fox News personality, in May 2025 after she was accused of misrepresenting her medical credentials.
Her withdrawal came the day before she was due to appear before a Senate committee and followed a public campaign against her by far-right activist Laura Loomer, who took aim at Nesheiwat’s previous support for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr. Casey Means, a controversial wellness influencer and figurehead of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative, similarly saw her hopes of office crash and burn in April of this year after her nomination languished in the Senate for two months following a bruising February confirmation hearing.
Senators from both parties grilled the Stanford-educated Means, who did not finish her surgical residency and does not hold an active medical license, over her thin clinical experience and her equivocal answers on vaccines.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
