It was about a year ago when Donald Trump abandoned his first choice to serve as surgeon general, Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, pulling her nomination without explanation. This week, the president also gave up on his second choice, a wellness influencer named Casey Means, who faced bipartisan opposition in the Senate due to her obvious lack of qualifications.
This set the stage for the White House’s third choice: former Fox News Channel contributor and radiologist Dr. Nicole Saphier, whom the president described as “an INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR” who will “help ‘MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN.’”
A NOTUS report noted, “The mere fact that Saphier has a professional medical background … is likely to increase her odds of confirmation greatly.” That’s probably true, though it was a jarring observation to see in print: We’ve reached the point at which a surgeon general nominee is positioned to succeed, not by earning a reputation as a celebrated public health professional, but by merely having “a professional medical background.”
That said, as Saphier’s nomination moves forward, there are a couple of key details that are worth keeping in mind. The first is that the nominee’s record on matters of science and medicine is not without controversy. As The New Republic summarized:
While Saphier is a radiologist, she’s not much better than Means. She has weighed in culture war issues on Fox, railing against movies with “woke ideologies.” … Her stance on vaccination is also troubling, as she has criticized mask and vaccine mandates and praised Trump for allowing military servicemembers expelled for refusing the Covid-19 vaccine back into the service.
An Ars Technica report added that Saphier also founded an herbal supplement business, and her Instagram account includes claims such as “rosemary and sage decrease Alzheimer’s risk.”
The Senate Republicans who had concerns about the president’s second choice, in other words, might very well have related concerns about his third.
But the other detail that’s worth keeping in mind is Saphier’s media background. In fact, when asked about his latest nominee at a White House event on Thursday afternoon, Trump specifically emphasized one thing: Saphier, like Trump’s first nominee for surgeon general, worked for Fox News.
In fact, Saphier joined the network as a contributor in 2018 and proceeded to make over 640 on-air Fox appearances, offering commentary on a variety of subjects, many of which had nothing to do with medicine or health.
If confirmed, she’ll become one of the many Fox veterans on Team Trump. In fact, it’s become rather difficult to keep track of all the former Fox News figures who have joined the Republican administration during its second term. Early last year, The New York Times published a tally and found 19 “former Fox News hosts, commentators, on-air medical experts, producers and other personnel” who had landed jobs in the Republican administration. Soon after, Media Matters published a revised total, putting the number at 20.
(That list did not include former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who briefly moonlighted as a guest host of a Fox News program while she was serving as Florida’s chief law enforcement official.)
In the months that followed, the list continued to grow. Trump tapped Don Bongino, for example, to serve as the deputy director of the FBI (he later returned to Fox after leaving the bureau), right around the same time that he appointed Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo to the Kennedy Center board. A month later, he appointed Bo Dietl, another Fox vet, to serve on a Department of Homeland Security advisory council. The month after that, Trump tapped Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro to serve as a U.S. attorney.
More recently, Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor, was confirmed to lead the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
All told, Saphier would be at least the 25th former Fox employee to join Trump’s team, enough to field a full football team, offense and defense, with a few additional folks on the bench. What’s more, there’s no reason to assume that others won’t follow.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Why Trump’s third choice for surgeon general is just as problematic as his first two appeared first on MS NOW.
