Trump: "If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID"

People on social media are laughing at him for saying this, but I forgot my driver’s license at home before a trip to the grocery store last week and they confiscated my Lucky Charms on the way out.

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You think they’re going to let you walk out of there with yellow moons, green clovers, and purple horseshoes without knowing that you’re you?

In fairness to the man, having had a rich real-estate developer dad, odds are fair that he’s never personally shopped for groceries. Ever.

“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes,” Trump complained. “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”

If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID,” Trump continued. “They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.”

I’m going to give him a pass on the cereal thing, mainly because I don’t want to have to deal mentally with how the world’s most powerful person arrived at the belief that ID is necessary to buy breakfast grains. What I can’t let go is his grasp of how voting works. Because Trump does vote, pretty regularly. He should know by now that you have to sign the registration book and whatnot. And in most states, unlike the process for buying Lucky Charms, you have to present ID. How does he imagine successfully bypassing all that by putting on a different hat or shirt?

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Does he think voter fraud is usually committed by people in Groucho glasses?

I know, I know. Take him seriously, not literally. I try, but sometimes it’s hard. Case in point, here’s WaPo describing how his decision not to visit Aisne-Marne cemetery in France last weekend went down:

Trump was told that morning by Deputy White House Chief of Staff Zachary D. Fuentes that the Secret Service had concerns about flying Marine One through the rain and fog from Paris to the cemetery 50 miles away, and that a motorcade could be lengthy and snarl traffic in the area, according to one senior White House official…

But Trump quickly grew infuriated by a torrent of tweets and media coverage suggesting that the president was afraid of the rain and did not respect veterans…

Trump told aides he thought he looked “terrible” and blamed his chief of staff’s office, and Fuentes in particular, for not counseling him that skipping the cemetery visit would be a public-relations nightmare.

Someone sufficiently in tune with American priorities to get himself elected president shouldn’t need advisors to tell him that skipping a planned visit to a war cemetery is a bad idea, particularly when other world leaders are attending and dealing with the same weather you are. “You need ID to buy cereal” is actually a more plausible belief than “Maybe people won’t mind if I avoid the inconvenience of honoring fallen soldiers.” What was he thinking?

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And what was he thinking two days later when he skipped a trip to Arlington on Veterans Day, which would have required a 10-minute car ride? You can blame Kelly for the Paris snafu if you insist but the Arlington absence later is inexplicable.

Anyway. My best theory for his “cereal” comment is that someone may have made a joke on “Fox & Friends” about getting carded while trying to buy groceries and he misunderstood. Exit question via Reason: Does Trump think most people are paying for their groceries by check, maybe? He’d be way wrong in believing so but you would at least need ID in that case.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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