When it comes to groceries, Donald Trump doesn’t have just one problem; he has three related problems.
The first and most obvious is their cost. The president has spent months insisting that he’s somehow succeeded in lowering the prices American consumers pay at supermarkets, but his claims are obviously untrue, no matter how many times he repeats them. (This led to an especially contentious exchange on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” when Trump became agitated after being confronted with reality.)
The second problem is that he considers “groceries” to be an exotic word. “It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term: ‘groceries,’” Trump said in April, as if he were introducing the public to foreign terminology. “It says ‘a bag with different things in it.’”
But as weird as it’s been to see the president lie about grocery costs, while lecturing the public on the definition of a word we’re all familiar with, there’s also a third problem: Trump still doesn’t know how people buy products at grocery stores.
This came up quite a bit during his first term. In 2018, for example, the Republican insisted that consumers had to show ID to purchase breakfast cereals (they do not). He later added that it was also necessary to present identification to buy bread (also wrong).
At a Tuesday-morning event at the White House, Trump went even further down the same path.
Trump: "It's time for Republicans to do what they have to do and that's terminate the filibuster … we should start tonight with 'the country's open, congratulations,' then we should pass voted ID, we should pass no mail in voting … you go to a grocery store, you have to give ID."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-11-05T13:37:04.447Z
As part of a pitch on proposed election restrictions, the president told Senate Republicans, “All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID. But for voting, they want no voter ID.”
For now, let’s put aside the fact that in-person voter fraud is extraordinarily rare, making voter ID laws an unnecessary solution to an imaginary problem. Let’s instead consider the simple fact that the incumbent American president, 10 years into his political career and five years into his White House tenure, is so detached from the lives of everyday Americans that he has no idea that people buy groceries all the time without presenting identification.
Whether Trump appreciates this or not, he’s making it far easier for his critics to paint him as woefully out of touch. Indeed, last week, as millions of American families confronted soaring health care costs and the loss of food assistance, their wealthy president prepared to leave his mansion for another golf weekend at one of the glorified country clubs that he owns. Before he left, Trump focused on the new marble bathroom he had installed at the White House (complete with an above-toilet chandelier), before dashing off to Florida — during a government shutdown that he’s made little effort to stop — for a trip that included a fancy party with his wealthy customers in the theme of a classic novel about some awful people who wasted money on lavish soirees. This week, he reminded the public that he doesn’t understand how grocery shopping works, either. A man of the people he is not. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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