In his ongoing approach of fighting fire with fire when it comes to President Donald Trump, California Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to have questioned whether the nation’s leader is suffering from dementia.
“Do people with dementia repeat false things over and over again?” reads a screenshot of a conversation with Grok, the artificial intelligence assistant available on the social media platform X, on Newsom’s X page.
This post was a response to another post by the account Acyn from MeidasTouch quoting Trump.
“We sent hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day to the Pacific Ocean. They turn a valve. The valve heads out, and we turned the valve back. I actually had to do it using force,” said the president. He went on to call Newsom “Gavin Newscum” – a nickname he often uses for the Democratic governor – and told him to “turn the rest of the water on.”
Previously, CalMatters and CNN published fact check reports on Trump’s claims that Newsom’s water policy in California led to the devastating wildfires there. According to CNN, 2 billion gallons of water Trump released from two California dams in July were actually directed to a dry lake basin 100 miles north of the Los Angeles area actually impacted by the wildfires.
In response to the question asked in the screenshot Newsom shared, Grok apparently responded with this: “Yes, people and dementia can repeat false statements or beliefs, a behavior often linked to memory impairments and cognitive changes. They can manifest as a confabulation, where they create or repeat false memories to fill gaps in recollection, or preservation, where they fixate on a particular idea or statement.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 6.9 million people age 65 and older in the nation are living with dementia. Over the course of two elections, people engaged in speculation that both he and/or former President Joe Biden were suffering from the condition, which can cause cognitive impairment in older people. Trump is currently 79 years old and Biden is 82. Newsom is 57, 10 years older than Trump’s oldest son (who is was in a relationship with Newsom’s ex-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, from 2024 through 2028).
Symptoms of dementia can include memory, attention and communication lapses, as well as difficulties with reasoning, judgement and problem solving, per the CDC. Signs can include getting lost in a familiar neighborhood, using unusual words to refer to objects, forgetting the names of close friends or family, forgetting old memories and not being able to complete common tasks.
“In recent years, there has been a lot of speculation that Donald Trump and Joe Biden may have dementia or some form of mental health condition,” said the Alzheimer’s Society, an organization based in the U.K., last summer. “While it’s right that voters should be able to discuss a candidate’s perceived mental and physical fitness for such an important role, it’s not right to speculate that someone specifically has dementia or a mental health condition.”
However, Audacy reported last week that Newsom’s new aggressive, meme-driven approach to attacking Trump, taking a page out of the president’s own playbook, has been met by an increase in support for a hypothetical Newsom campaign for the White House in 2028. For example, Morning Consult polling numbers released this week showed that Newsom’s support among Democratic party voters had increased to 19% from 11% in June. At the same time, Trump’s approval rating is hovering around 40%, lower than when his term kicked off, based on the Economist approval rating tracker.
After the dementia-focused screenshot, Newsom took aim at the president’s hands, which “Last Week Tonight host” John Oliver has suggested are tiny.
“You really want to have the conversation about hands?” said the post, which included video footage of Trump saying that Newsom had “some strange hand action going on.”