Reporters skirmish with White House over ID for groceries and voting

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders couldn’t say Wednesday when the last time President Donald Trump went into a grocery store, after the president defended voter identification laws by suggesting that shoppers need to show ID when they check out at grocery stores.

Trump, at his campaign-style rally Tuesday night in Tampa, Florida, asserted that laws requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls were reasonable because “if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID.”


Critics of voter ID laws have argued that they are unnecessary because voter fraud in the U.S. is virtually non-existent and because such laws disproportionately disenfranchise poor and minority voters, for whom access to photo ID can be more difficult.

Asked Wednesday about the last time the president, a Manhattan billionaire with his own fleet of private jets and helicopters, entered a grocery store, Sanders replied: “I'm not sure. I’m not sure why that matters, either.” Pressed by reporters who responded that, no, photo IDs are not required to buy groceries, Sanders offered that they were for alcohol purchases, to which a reporter replied that the president does not drink.

“He’s not saying every time he went in. He said, ‘When you go to the grocery store,’” Sanders offered as an explanation for the president’s remark. “I'm pretty sure that everybody in here who’s been to a grocery store that’s purchased beer or wine has probably had to show their ID. If they didn’t, then that’s probably a problem with the grocery store.”