INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Donald Trump is the latest in the line of many politicians to fall into the grocery trapIs it any surprise that the man who lived in a
gilded penthouse doesn't know how grocery stores work At a Florida rally on Tuesday, President Donald Trump related voter ID laws to grocery
shopping."If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID," Trump said at the event at the Florida
"You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture."Purchases of alcohol, cigarettes, or cold medicine, or
payments made with a check require a photo ID
Purchases of, say, Cap'n Crunch or rhubarb or frozen chicken nuggets do not
"This man has never bought a carton of milk in his life, has he" tweeted Kaili Joy Gray of Shareblue.Of course he hasn't
Respectfully: Duh.The grocery store is a minefield for politicians
In 1992, President George H.W
Bush, who had "lived the cloistered life of a top Washington bureaucrat for decades," according to the New York Times, was described as
being amazed by an electronic grocery scanner, technology that had been in use for more than a decade - though his team later clarified that
he had been impressed by a particular scanner that could read torn bar codes
Still, in a recession, the characterization that he was out of touch took hold - all the way to the polls.He's not the only politician to
fall in the grocery trap: During his 2007 presidential campaign, Rudy Giuliani underestimated the cost of milk and bread by more than half
And even politicians who go into the store can be criticized for shopping at the wrong one, or buying the wrong thing
In a famous gaffe, then-candidate Barack Obama posed a question at an Iowa rally: "Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they
charge for arugula I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff." There were no Whole Foods stores in Iowa at the time - and
besides, why wasn't he eating iceberg or romaine like a Real American, anywayIt's a great clueless-rich-person trope in pop culture, too
On "30 Rock," executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), having expanded his television company's empire to include couches, gives a rousing
speech: "As we speak, our fellow countryman are rolling out our Kabletown Couches on the assembly line, earning an honest day's pay so they
can go to the store and buy milk for their family, which costs
oh, I don't know, $90 a gallon." In another episode, he refers to the price of a 10-pound bag of potatoes as $400, and says he gets them
from the "grocery concierge." Lucille Bluth, the cluelessly rich matriarch of "Arrested Development," has similar grocery problems
"I mean, it's one banana, Michael," she says to her son
"What could it cost Ten dollars"The Post's John Wagner reports that at a briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee
Sanders said she was "not sure" when Trump last went to a grocery store, and added that she wasn't sure it mattered, either
She later said that the comment was in reference to purchasing alcohol, though Trump did not mention alcohol in his remarks and has
previously claimed he does not drink it, and has never smoked a cigarette.British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher "used to wield a shopping
basket and talk about the price of the pound and say something needed to be done about it," British columnist Tim Montgomerie told the BBC
Documents released by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation show that the prime minister was briefed on the prices of common goods like eggs,
And weeks after her 2016 loss to Trump, Hillary Clinton was spotted shopping for ingredients for her Thanksgiving dinner in Chappaqua, New
Joe Biden attended the grand opening of a Costco in Washington and ate a bunch of free samples
(Politicians: They're just like us! Except when they aren't.)Grocery stores and certain products have come to be political signifiers on
Trump won only 22 percent of counties with a Whole Foods, wrote Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute
There are "Whole Foods Republicans" and "Sam's Club's Republicans." Belgian endive became a constant joke in the 1988 election, after
candidate Michael Dukakis suggested that struggling corn and soybean farmers try growing the less-common produce - and sales of the
vegetable shot up immediately.If knowing the price of common goods is an indicator of how in touch a politician is, perhaps a better
indicator for Trump would be fast food
He is known to enjoy McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken
But if you ask him the price of a Big Mac, there's a good chance Trump wouldn't know the answer any better than he'd understand a grocery
