Type “does trump show signs of dementia” into Google’s search bar, and you’ll run into a wall where the AI-friendly features suddenly halt.
Instead of the familiar summarized AI Overview Google offers for a wide range of questions, the answer comes back with a simple notice: no AI Overview available for this search.
Try similar questions involving Trump’s mental fitness, and results remain the same. Questions regarding dementia, Alzheimer’s, or senility tied to the former president yield only a list of standard web links within AI Mode, not the usual brief generated summary.
Switch the name to President Biden and the inconsistency deepens. Google also holds back AI Overviews in the first basic search, but then, in AI Mode, up comes a summary. That response is cautious, stating outright, “It’s not possible to definitively state whether former President Joe Biden has dementia based solely on publicly available information.”
Questions about Biden and Alzheimer’s get a similar AI treatment in summary form. The result is clear: Google asserts the evidence isn’t there for a diagnosis, and there’s no public confirmation.
Presidents, Privacy, and Search Results
Try the same approach with other prominent leaders, such as Barack Obama, and the result changes again. Ask Google if Obama shows signs of dementia, and the AI Overview appears, pointing out that there are no statements or public signs from medical professionals that suggest he has dementia.
Repeat the same search in AI Mode, and once again, the answer is there. The AI-generated content confirms that, regarding Obama, professional sources have found no such evidence.
This uneven approach has not gone unnoticed, especially as questions about cognitive health dog both Trump and Biden, giving their advanced ages and the public scrutiny surrounding each candidate. American voters are interested in clarity about both men’s fitness for office, but technology companies find themselves caught between accuracy concerns and worries that the answers themselves could provoke controversy.
concerns about Trump’s age and health have also ramped up, especially as AI summaries, while often useful, remain prone to error or even fabrication, and companies like Google have every reason to be careful about how they handle sensitive health-related queries about public figures. On top of these concerns, Google AI Mode adds multimodal image search capabilities and announced this week it would pay more than twenty four million dollars to settle a contentious lawsuit surrounding Trump’s removal from YouTube, an episode that highlighted the pressure tech firms face when navigating political topics.
Pressed on why AI Overviews do not appear for some searches but show up for others, Google spokesperson Davis Thompson only commented, “As we’ve said, AI Overviews and AI Mode won’t show a response to every query.”
