Gavin Newsom is still on dementia watch.
The California governor reignited speculations about the state of Donald Trump’s mental faculties after the president rehashed a long-debunked claim about the state’s response to the devastating Los Angeles wildfires in January.
During a rambling speech awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Tuesday, Trump once again claimed that California’s response to the wildfires was hobbled by its refusal to let water come in from the Pacific Northwest—even though that doesn’t connect to the state’s water systems.
“If we didn’t go into Los Angeles early on in the administration… we would have lost our city,” he said. “Now they already lost 25,000 houses to fire because they wouldn’t let the water come in from the Pacific Northwest, which they should have done. I said it. You better do it. They didn’t do it… Would have been a different kind of a thing if they did what they were supposed to do.”
Newsom responded on X by posting a screenshot of an AI search query.
https://t.co/BeHD3ZXUmV pic.twitter.com/abLlQ19fFt
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) October 14, 2025
“Is not having a sense of reality a symptom of dementia?” he asked the search engine.
“Yes. Losing a sense of reality — such as perceiving things that aren’t real or believing things that aren’t true — can indeed be a symptom of dementia,” the AI responded.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.
Just last month, Newsom told “grandpa” Trump to “take your dementia meds” after the president made the same claims about refusing water from the Pacific Northwest.
“You are making things up again,” Newsom’s press office wrote at the time.
Newsom, who has emerged as one of Trump’s top antagonists, first lobbed dementia claims against the president in August.
After Trump ordered Newsom to “turn the rest of the water on,” the California Democrat responded by posting a screenshot of another AI chatbot’s affirmative response to the question, “Do people with dementia repeat false things over and over again?”
In January, Trump became the oldest president to be inaugurated at the age of 78. Since celebrating his birthday in June, the president has faced relentless questions over his health, thanks to sightings of his bruised hands, swollen ankles, and numerous mental flubs.
Psychologist John Gartner earlier told The Daily Beast Podcast that he observed a “major deterioration” in Trump’s language skills, motor skills, and impulse control
“He used to speak with a high level of vocabulary in very polished paragraphs. Now what we see is not only has his vocabulary gone down, but… there are times when he’s really unable to complete a thought. Sometimes he’s unable to complete a word,” Gartner, said.
The post Newsom Reignites His Theory That Trump, 79, Has Dementia appeared first on The Daily Beast.
