Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) accused President Donald Trump of having dementia because he keeps repeating the same lie over and over again.
The conspiracy theory is that Newsom somehow wasn't releasing a flood of water that could be used to extinguish the wildfires in Southern California. Somehow he was sitting on tons of water that could be used to fight the fires that comes from snow runoff.
According to Trump, the entire wildfire in Southern California would never have happened to begin with due to sprinklers.
"You wouldn't have had the fire because all the sprinklers would've worked in the houses," said Trump.
Homes don't have fire suppression sprinkler systems. Large structures do.
"Forty-six states have completely removed the sprinkler requirements for one- and two-family homes," said the National Association of Home Builders.
As one fact-check, from CNN, explained, "This is false. Newsom has never refused to sign a 'water restoration declaration.' In fact, there is no such document, as Newsom’s office said on social media on Wednesday and experts on California water policy confirmed."
Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank, told CNN in January, “At no time was water scarcity in general an issue. Rather, there were local shortages of water during the firefight, principally due to infrastructure constraints. But Southern California has plenty of water in storage right now, so this was not a limiting factor."
Newsom even published comments on the governor's website from water agencies, water contractors, and a metro water district dispelling Trump's myth.
Newsom replied to Trump's post with a screen capture in which he asks the AI site Perplexity whether it's a sign of dementia to repeat the same "crazy conspiracies" over and over again.
People with dementia often repeat the same statements, questions, and sometimes false or mistaken beliefs, primarily because of memory loss and impaired reasoning. This repetitive behavior can include everyday concerns, but may also involve delusions of persistent falsehoods, such as believing people are stealing from them or thinking they are in danger—sometimes leading to repeated expression of these ideas," Perplexity wrote, according to Newsom's screen capture.
See the clip of Trump below or at the link here.