In a recent interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump walked back his campaign promise to lower grocery prices.
"Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down. It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard," Trump told Time, admitting to what many of us knew months ago.
On Thursday, Trump offered up a perplexing story about “an old woman” buying three apples at a grocery store and taking “one of the apples back to the refrigerator” because the price was too high. (Apples are not usually stocked in refrigerators.)
The only thing that’s clear in Trump’s incoherent story is that he hasn’t spent much time in a supermarket in a long while.
This past Sunday, during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said, “I won on groceries. Very simple word, groceries. Like almost—you know, who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries. ... I won an election based on that.”
Just days before the election, Trump asked his audience at a campaign rally, “People say 'groceries,' right? I haven't used that—it's such a sort of an old term."
In September, Trump waddled into a Pennsylvania grocery store for a bizarre photo op, which involved him sort of throwing a $100 bill at a lady while she was at checkout. Germs, I guess?
When speaking at the Detroit Economic Club in October, Trump defined the word groceries (maybe for himself?), saying, “The word grocery. It’s a sort of simple word, but it sort of means everything you eat. The stomach is speaking, it always does. I have more complaints about bacon and things going up—double, triple, quadruple.”
Before that, it seems Trump might not have known what groceries were.
In September, during a town hall in Michigan, Trump was asked how he would bring down grocery prices, and he responded with a word salad, bouncing from the topic of donuts to windmills and China.
And at an August press conference, Trump was flanked by tables stacked with groceries while he ranted about—what else?—windmills.
Trump’s strange relationship to the concept of groceries goes back to at least his first term. In 2019, Trump claimed buying groceries was harder than voting.
“You know, if you want to go out and buy groceries, you need identification. If you want to do almost anything, you need identification,” Trump told a Louisiana crowd. “The only thing you don’t need identification for is to vote, the most important single thing you’re doing—to vote.”
Okaaaay …
