Gavin Newsom hurls ‘dementia’ jab at Trump amid escalating feud

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) trolled President Donald Trump for repeating a false claim about the water supply in Los Angeles.

Trump on Wednesday accused Newsom of not allowing water from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles amid the devastating wildfires that raged across the area in January. Trump has repeated this claim for months, crediting himself with “turning the water” on to send to Los Angeles.

“He didn’t allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. You know, they have tremendous amounts of water in California. People don’t know. They send the water out to the Pacific Ocean. So I demanded it be open,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

“If that were open during the fire, before the fire, you wouldn’t have the fire, because all the sprinklers would have worked in the houses. They had no water. They had no water in the fire hydrants. He wouldn’t have had the fires,” he said.

Newsom mocked Trump for repeating this false claim on social media platform X. He posted a screenshot of a question posed to an artificial intelligence chatbot, seemingly accusing the president of having “dementia.”

“Do people with dementia repeat the same falsehoods and crazy conspiracies over and over again?” the question stated.

The response stated: “People with dementia often repeat the same statements, questions, and sometimes false or mistaken beliefs, primarily because of memory loss and impaired reasoning.”

Newsom’s press office also criticized Trump over the false claim, calling him a “bumbling idiot” on X.

“Unfortunately, the President of the United States is a bumbling idiot. THERE WAS PLENTY OF WATER IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (IN FACT, STATE RESERVOIRS WERE AT HISTORIC HIGHS!)” the press office wrote in one post.

“Water from the Pacific Northwest DOESN’T EVEN connect with the state water systems. NOR does the water he wasted travel to the LA area!” the office wrote in a separate post.

Newsom’s press office has been mocking Trump by mimicking the president’s social media posts for weeks, often tweeting posts in all-caps and giving his political rivals new nicknames. The MAGA base and conservatives have complained about Newsom’s new social media strategy, with many arguing that he is not being authentic.

Newsom even took the trolling a step further last month by launching his own merchandise shop that mocks Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

The shop includes a red hat that reads, “Newsom was right about everything,” which directly mocks Trump’s own hat he was spotted wearing on Friday. The shop also includes a white tank top that reads, “Trump is not hot,” and a red hat that has “Real Patriot” written across it.