On May 18, 2025, former President Joe Biden's office announced he had received a diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer. Later that day, multiple social media accounts (archived, archived, archived, archived) claimed that Donald Trump Jr. — President Donald Trump's oldest child — made an X post questioning how former first lady Dr. Jill Biden could have missed her husband's cancer.
Dozens of Snopes readers sought verification of the claim by writing in and searching our website.
The alleged post read:
What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup???
The X post was real. Donald Trump Jr. posted it on May 18 (archived):
Jill Biden uses the title "Dr." because she earned a doctorate degree (archived) in education from the University of Delaware in 2007, but she is not a medical doctor. It is common to preface the name of anyone who holds a doctoral degree with the title "Dr." This does not automatically imply medical expertise.
The next day, Donald Trump Jr. posted on X (archived) that he meant his comment about the former first lady to be sarcastic, writing:
I sometimes forget that part of the mental disorder of leftism is an inability to understand sarcasm. So for the confused libs out there, I'm well aware that Jill Biden is a fake doctor, not a real one...Unlike the Dems who were calling for her to be Surgeon General in 2020
Jill Biden is not a "fake doctor," as Donald Trump Jr. claimed in that post, even though she is not a medical doctor. The title "doctor" applies to multiple professions. Donald Trump Jr. may have been referencing a 2020 incident in which "The View" host Whoopi Goldberg mistakenly said Jill Biden should be surgeon general, calling her a "hell of a doctor."