President Trump Thinks You Need an ID to Buy Groceries

Categorize this as “a seemingly frivolous anecdote about our president that actually proves a larger, horrible point.”

The frivolous, funny part is that while trying to argue for voter ID laws at a rally in Tampa, Trump dropped this quote:

“You know, if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID.”

He went further:

“You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.”

“In this country, the only time you don’t need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman.”

Here’s video…come for the groceries bit, stay for the idiotic “Merry Christmas” follow-up:

President Trump, telling his supporters why he wanted Americans to be required to show identification before casting their votes, claimed that they needed to have IDs “to buy groceries.” He did not elaborate. https://t.co/iYSYzA2XxMpic.twitter.com/H4DGjZVYxy

— CNN (@CNN) August 1, 2018

Now, obviously you don’t need picture ID to buy groceries. Maybe if you’re buying alcohol, but I’m 35, and even that doesn’t happen very often anymore. The punch line here is that Trump is so rich, and has been for so long, that he has no idea how grocery shopping actually works. Or, in fact, any kind of personal shopping, since there’s almost nothing in this world beyond alcohol that you need a photo ID to buy.

The larger point here, though, is how comic/tragic/dangerous it is that anybody believes this man can relate to them on anything like a personal level, or that he serves any function in the White House beyond deepening America’s already-staggering economic inequality by means of debilitating tax cuts and other sweeping policy changes.

Drilling down to the specific issue, the only reason Trump or anyone like him wants to require voter ID—no matter what justification they use—is to limit poor Democrats from voting. That’s it, period. Every “solution” has a problem, and the problem in this case is not voter fraud, since voter fraud doesn’t actually exist in America. The problem is low income minorities who vote for Democrats, and requiring voter ID is—like the literacy tests of old—a great way to disenfranchise them.

But words like these are wind, and all that apparently matters to the hooting masses is that the ones coming from Trump’s mouth are scripture, no matter how off-base or idiotic. And in case you weren’t thoroughly depressed yet, here’s footage from that same rally of those same masses greeting the press:

Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018