Politicians have long tried to avoid appearing out of touch. People in positions of authority are often insulated from the day-to-day challenges of regular people, but that’s precisely why political leaders tend to go out of their way to show they understand and can relate to everyday experiences their constituents face all the time.
Donald Trump, a wealthy television personality before he entered politics, has long struggled in this area, failing to even keep up appearances.
This is especially true on one specific issue: groceries.
As The New York Times noted, the president ran into fresh trouble during an event in Las Vegas on the economy.
Trump was touting tax cuts for small businesses when he came across the term ‘corner store’ as he read off prepared remarks. ‘What is a corner store? I’ve never heard that term. I know what a corner store is, but I’ve never heard it described a corner store,’ said Trump. He looked up sharply and said, ‘Who the hell wrote that?’
Evidently, he didn’t familiarize himself with the text that someone else had written for him ahead of the event.
After years of struggling with this issue, it’s amazing he hasn’t yet familiarized himself with the basics. Early in his first term, for example, Trump insisted that consumers need to show identification while buying groceries, including cereal and bread. (None of this was true.)
In 2019, during a government shutdown, the Republican also argued that supermarket owners would allow furloughed federal employees to buy groceries on credit, because “they know the people.” (That didn’t make any sense.)
In his second term, his approach to the issue has grown weirder, to the point that he even began characterizing “groceries” as an exotic word last year.
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“It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term: ‘groceries,’” Trump said last April, as if he were introducing the public to foreign terminology. “It says ‘a bag with different things in it.’”
More recently, the president also said he’d had enormous success in lowering grocery prices, even as grocery prices climbed.
But his remarks in Las Vegas managed to break new ground. Trump, who used to live in a gold tower in Manhattan, and who now splits his time between a presidential mansion and a glorified country club in Florida, can wax rhapsodic about his marble preferences and his affection for Corinthian columns, but confronted with the words “corner store,” he was utterly baffled.
In 1992, George H.W. Bush, running for a second term, appeared surprised when he attended a National Grocers Association convention in Orlando and saw the latest grocery store checkout scanning technology. The criticisms of the incumbent president weren’t altogether fair, but the incident nevertheless made the Republican appear out of touch at a key moment, and it became one of the indelible images of the year.
More than three decades later, Trump’s “What is a corner store?” question is almost certainly worse.
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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