Trump’s Voter ID Argument Has Us Convinced He’s Never Done This Basic Thing

On Nov 6, 2025

President Donald Trump appeared to be seriously confused about how people perform basic tasks while addressing Senate Republicans at the White House on Wednesday morning.

As the president demanded senators bulldoze a path to reopening the government by nuking the filibuster, he didn’t say paying federal workers or funding food benefits were the reason they needed to take such extreme measures.

Rather, Trump told senators that passing voter ID laws and banning mail-in voting should be at the top of their to-do lists.

The president’s plea for voter restrictions, which just happened to be on his mind the morning after Democrats won an array of prominent off-cycle elections, came with some curious reasoning.

“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,” he claimed. “But for voting, they want no voter ID. It’s only for one reason: because they cheat.”

pic.twitter.com/qgIhY9Ge8z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 5, 2025

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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… pic.twitter.com/qgIhY9Ge8z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 5, 2025

The billionaire seems to have been harboring this basic shopping misconception since at least 2018, when he claimed Americans needed ID to buy a “box of cereal.” In 2023, he said the same thing about bread.

And while Trump’s ideas about where and when Americans need IDs sounded mind-bogglingly out of touch, somehow they were far less perplexing than another recent time he brought up groceries.

Musing about the word itself back in April, he called groceries an “old-fashioned term” before defining it in the strangest ways.

“I used it on the campaign. It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Groceries,” he said wistfully. “It’s a bag with different things in it.”

All of that would seem laughable, until you remember this is the man who was fine leaving millions of Americans without food assistance while he threw a posh “Great Gatsby”-themed costume party at his Florida estate this weekend. At that point, it seems more infuriating than absurd.