“Petty, Loud and Obnoxious”: Surgeon General Nom Nicole Saphier’s Deleted Tweets About Trump
It’s always a fun little game, when the Trump administration makes a pick out of left field to nominate a high-ranking official, to wait and see how well Trump’s team actually bothered to vet that person, especially when it comes to their history of social media posting. And wouldn’t you know it: New Surgeon General nominee Dr. Nicole Saphier, despite firmly projecting a MAGA Republican image, has actually done plenty of (now of course deleted) criticizing of not only Trump and the administration, but of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well. Which is, dare we say, a good sign that we might be dealing with a proper doctor here?
To be sure, Saphier checks plenty of Trump’s typical boxes for a nominee: She’s a woman unafraid of blonde hair dye, who appeared frequently on Fox News since the COVID-19 pandemic to say critical things about the Biden administration. That’s like 90% of the rigorous Trump standard right there. Her nomination, however, is also a not-so-subtle rebuke of the Make America Healthy Again movement of which RFK Jr. is the nominal, pathetic figurehead, given the way that Dr. Nicole Saphier is replacing the previous, MAHA-approved nominee of “MAHA mom” and enthusiastic vaccine denier Casey Means, who didn’t even hold an active medical license. What I can only presume Trump’s team wasn’t counting on is that given her prior posting, Saphier doesn’t seem to personally like Trump one bit.
“The Musk-Trump spat is like watching two billionaires throw sand in a sandbox—petty, loud, & obnoxious,” wrote Saphier in a now-deleted tweet at the height of Musk and Trump’s falling out, at right about the time that Musk was loudly blaring to the world that the President of the United States was a pedophile. “Bravo’s Andy Cohen is probably salivating, knowing his entire net worth thrives on grown adults acting like toddlers in a tiara fight.”
Such tweets, thankfully, are still archived on the web, because there’s no such thing as truly “deleted” posting in this day and age. Saphier has since responded by making her entire account private as she tries to avoid more people snooping around the intimate, private details of … her publicly posted opinions from less than a year ago.
Saphier, a radiology specialist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, also bristled repeatedly in a series of deleted tweets about Trump’s fact-free and seemingly random attempts to demonize Tylenol (acetaminophen) in 2025, when the President kept suggesting that the drug was not safe for pregnant women, or had links to autism. Rather than use the pain reliever/fever reducer, Trump told pregnant women to “tough it out,” a sentiment the Saphier didn’t seem to appreciate one bit. As she wrote at the time: “As a mom of 3 kids, I don’t love a man telling me to ‘tough it out’ when it comes to pregnancy. Words matter. Facts matter too.”
She went on to post other scientific studies suggesting the safety and effectiveness of Tylenol, before tweeting the following days later: “My son has a high fever and I’m angry that I am now questioning giving him Tylenol. Do data exist showing harm to kids that haven’t been shared with the public or is the Tylenol ‘controversy’ purely hyperbolic and conjecture? Needless to say, I’m mad.” All of said posts have since been deleted by Saphier.
Nor did Saphier spare RFK Jr. and his “reforms” (aka gutting) of the CDC and HHS from her now-deleted online criticism. She slammed his hand-picked crew of flunkies for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices as “lacking diversity of thought and areas of expertise,” the same panel that a federal judge would eventually more or less dissolve, citing that they were all woefully unqualified. That judge, by the way, said at the time: “Of the fifteen members currently on ACIP, even under the most generous reading, only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines.”
Saphier, in fact, seems much more inclined to keep previous vaccine standards intact, certainly in comparison to the likes of Casey Means–another indicator of how RFK Jr.’s movement, with its deeply unpopular vaccine skepticism, has lost the ear of the President. In September of 2025, Saphier wrote that RFK Jr.’s hand-picked ACIP was acting as a “gatekeeper,” keeping the combined measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox vaccine away from children who were now “less protected.”
Even as recently as March of this year, Dr. Nicole Saphier was suggesting online that the Trump administration was sweeping measles cases under the rug in an attempt to not formally announce that the U.S. had lost its measles elimination status, worried about the impact that this embarrassment could have on the 2026 midterm elections.
This all smacks of someone who very clearly could not have known that they were in the running, in the eyes of the administration, for a position like Surgeon General. Given that she has since deleted all of this material, Saphier certainly wouldn’t have been accusing the administration of running a measles cover-up two months ago if she thought that she was about to be considered for the job. The question now is how willing a regular Fox News guest will be to ditch everything she’s ever believed for a position of greater prestige in the administration. If history is any indication, we would bet on “really very willing.”
That certainly seems to be what the administration is hoping, anyway. White House spokesperson Kush Desai gave the following hype to the Surgeon General nominee to CNN, ignoring the obvious embarrassment of her Trump-critical critical social media posts: “Dr. Nicole Saphier is an accomplished physician who has practiced radiology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and has been an outspoken voice on breast cancer prevention, intrusive COVID-19 mandates, the politicization of science, and the federal government’s role in America’s chronic disease epidemic. She will be a powerful asset for President Trump and work tirelessly to deliver on every facet of his MAHA agenda.”
It’s pretty clear that what the Trump administration was looking for here was someone with less baggage and less visible crazy than Means, with a stance on vaccines that more closely matches the actual nationwide opinion. Casey Means had been praised by the MAHA faithful, like health influencer Alex Clark, as a “spokesperson for MAHA,” whose appointment would “soothe a lot of this anxiety” that Trump has recently experienced with the MAHA portion of his base. Trump rejected those overtures in choosing to pivot to Saphier, which has already led Clark to call the decision “a catastrophic mistake,” saying that Saphier “gets an F when it comes to all things MAHA.” I’ve already written about the MAHA movement’s persistent desire to ignore how Trump and RFK Jr. are constantly betraying them, but it sounds like this might finally be a bridge too far.
The next Surgeon General nominee is Nicole Saphier, a breast cancer radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Apparently she’s not MAHA enough, and strong MAHA adherents do not want her. She is a marginal step up from Casey Means, but the bar is already low.
???? www.politico.com/news/2026/05…
— Princess Vimentin PhD | Cancer Biologist (@princess-vimentin.bsky.social) May 5, 2026 at 1:33 PM
That point is slammed home by an unnamed “Trump advisor” quoted by CNN, who disparaged the very idea of the MAHA movement, saying “I hate to say it, but I think they’re a little bit overrated–to some extent, MAHA has always been a paper tiger.” Saphier, on the other hand, is amusingly described by the same advisor as “MAHA, but it’s like, sane MAHA,” a statement beautiful in its calculated impact of denigrating RFK Jr. from afar. A chef’s kiss to that staffer.
Trump, meanwhile, will presumably suck it up and choose to ignore Saphier’s previously slights against him, as long as she sufficiently grovels in the here and now. After all, Musk called him a pedophile to his face, and now those two are friends again–at the end of the day, Trump really only cares about whether a person is currently willing to flatter him. If Dr. Nicole Saphier can do that, and also promote halfway sane vaccine policy at the same time? Well, that might be the best we can possibly hope for in a Trump-appointed Surgeon General.