California Governor Gavin Newsom has revived his claim that Donald Trump is suffering from dementia after the president tore into him on Fox News Monday.
During his interview on The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham gave Trump an opening to attack his fiercest Democratic rival. He gladly took it.
“I mean, I knew Gavin for four years, I got along great with him,” the president said, referring to his first term. “But he’s gone radical left.”
Trump, 79, proceeded to hit Newsom, 58, over a number of issues, falsely claiming that California’s long-delayed bullet train project is “3,000 percent” over budget and that no building permits has been issued in areas hit by January’s Palisades Fire.
“He did something even worse than that,” Trump then claimed. “He’s now taking a big section of Palisades or some area, and he’s going to build low-income housing where they used to have luxury housing.”
While the state is providing $101 million to fund affordable housing projects in and around the burn zones, no proposals in the Palisades have received funding, according to the Los Angeles Times.
It took Newsom, a likely contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, less than an hour to respond to Trump’s on-air rant.
The social media-savvy governor posted a screenshot of a chat with AI bot Grok, in which he asked, “Do people with dementia repeat false things over and over again?”
“Yes, people with dementia frequently repeat false statements, questions, or stories over and over. This is a common symptom known as perseveration or repetitive speech/behavior, and it often involves inaccurate or fabricated information (sometimes called confabulation),” replied Grok, which is developed by Elon Musk’s xAI company.
In his escalating feud with the president, Newsom has returned again and again to the claim that Trump is showing signs of dementia amid the president’s frequent mental gaffes.
When Trump claimed that California’s response to the Los Angeles 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—he similarly used an AI search query to suggest the aging president has dementia.
After Trump wrote then quickly deleted a post on Truth Social that read “South Carerdddd,” Newsom commented on X, “The extra ds stand for dementia.”
Seemingly conscious of Newsom’s potential 2028 presidential run, Trump made a point of criticizing him as a future commander-in-chief.
“Honestly I always liked him, but he’s a horrible governor, he’s a horrible governor. If he ran the country like that, this country would be gone,” Trump said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
