California Governor Gavin Newsom poured water on President Trump’s cabinet meeting on Tuesday by implying that the president is suffering from dementia.
About 30 minutes into the cabinet meeting, President Trump took aim at Governor “Newscum” and repeated a claim, which he’s made several times, that the federal government had to force California to “turn on the water“ after wildfires earlier this year.
Newsom reposted a clip on X of Trump’s diatribe and responded with a barb of his own: a screenshot of an interaction with Grok, the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, in which Grok was asked, “Do people with dementia repeat false things over and over again?”
The chatbot responded in the affirmative: “Yes, people with dementia can repeat false statements or beliefs, a behavior often linked to memory impairments and cognitive changes.
“This can manifest as confabulation, where they create or repeat false memories to fill gaps in recollection, or perseveration, where they fixate on a particular idea or statement,” the chatbot continued.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, a White House spokesperson said, in part, “Newscum will say anything to distract from his terrible handling of the California wildfires that President Trump had to come in and clean up.”
Trump, 79, has fixated on California’s water supply and the federal government’s supposedly heroic intervention to bolster it.
On Tuesday, the president repeated the claim he first made in January that California ran out of water due to misguided environmental policies.
“They had no water in the fire hydrants. They had no water in the sprinkler systems that people put up in their ceilings. There was no water,” Trump said.
“So we sent hundreds of millions of gallons a day into the Pacific Ocean. They turn a valve. The valve heads out. We turned the valve back. I actually had to do it using force.”
During the wildfires that rampaged through Los Angeles in January, fire hydrants did run dry. However, city officials said that was due to “tremendous demand,” rather than any pre-existing issues with water supply.
Meanwhile, Trump’s claim that he had to exercise force to compel California to send more water south echoes his claim in January that the U.S. military entered the state “under Emergency Powers [to turn] on the water.”
“The military did not enter California,” the state’s Department of Water Resources said in a statement responding to Trump’s Truth Social post. “The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days.”
As more wildfires rage on the West Coast, Trump tried to put pressure on Newsom on Tuesday.
“I’m telling Gavin Newscum by this conversation right now: turn the rest of the water on. Turn it on.”
Newsom’s stinging response comes as he’s infuriated MAGA voters by mimicking Trump’s puerile social media strategy in recent weeks.
His office makes several all-caps X posts each day and has also started selling merchandise that’s Trump-inspired.
Trump said during his cabinet meeting that “the Republican Party is the party of common sense. We’re sharp.”
On Monday, Trump mentioned a favor he did for the mysterious “Kristi Whitmer”—which could have been a portmanteau of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or a repressed memory about Christine Whitman, who was governor of New Jersey in the 90s.
He’s referred to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as “the Republic of Condo,” the Russian city of St. Petersburg by its Soviet-era name of Leningrad, and Noem by the name of an LPGA golfer, Cristie Kerr—all in the past month.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration had disgraced doctor Ronny Jackson declare the president “mentally and physically sharper than ever before.”
