How ‘Groceries’ Explains Trump’s Detachment From Working Americans
Donald Trump is set to impose a sweeping tariffs package on Wednesday that everyone from economists to Republican lawmakers to even Trump himself have acknowledged will make life harder for working Americans. The president doesn’t seem too bothered. “I couldn’t care less,” he said over the weekend, when asked about his tariffs jacking up the cost of cars.
Trump doesn’t care because affordable cars — especially the cheaper ones that will be most impacted by the tariffs — aren’t of much concern to him or the other rich people whose immediate personal interests his administration is tailored to serve. Nevertheless, the president conned millions of people into voting for him last November in part by promising to lower costs for working Americans.
The economy isn’t looking very favorable to those Americans at the present moment, which may be why Trump recently decided to dust off one of his more bizarre campaign fixations: “groceries.” The word is in quotes here because Trump has seemed more intrigued by the very concept of disparate food products sold in a retail store, than taking any sort of concerted action to lower how much they cost.
“The cost of groceries, a word that I used a lot on the campaign,” Trump said at a women’s event last Wednesday. “It’s like an old-fashioned word, but it’s a beautiful word, a very descriptive word. The groceries are coming down.”
“I inherited a groceries situation,” he said a day earlier at the White House. “The groceries went way up. An old-fashioned word, it’s a very descriptive word. Groceries have gone through the roof.” He brought them up again in an interview with Newsmax later in the day. “I have used the word groceries,” he said. “It’s like an old-fashioned word, but really it’s not, and people understand it.”
It’s not weird for a president to talk about bringing the price of groceries down, but Trump seems incapable of raising the issue without briefly digressing to marvel at the word itself. “The word grocery,” he said while campaigning last October. “You know, it’s sort of a simple word, but it sort of means like everything you eat. The stomach is speaking. It always does.” Trump almost seemed to take credit for the word during an interview with Meet the Press in December, after he’d won the election. “I won on groceries,” he said. “It’s a very simple word. Who uses the word? I started using the word. The groceries.”
It’s a simple word, but bringing down the price of groceries isn’t so simple — especially when your economic plan revolves around slapping vindictive tariffs on the nation’s closest trading partners, which will almost certainly cause the price of groceries to rise. Kristen Welker asked Trump if he could guarantee this wouldn’t happen during the same Meet the Press interview. He had insisted it wouldn’t before he won, but changed his tune now that the votes had been cast. “I can’t guarantee anything,” he said. “I can’t guarantee tomorrow.”
Sure enough, the price of groceries have largely gone up since Trump took office — and there’s no telling how high they could climb after the tariffs he is expected to announce on Wednesday, which he and his allies have been marketing as a historic “Liberation Day,” go into effect in earnest.
Trump could be excused for not knowing the price of groceries given that he surely has not bought them in decades, but believing the word itself is “old-fashioned” — and believing he can relate to people by describing it as such — signals a truly profound disconnect from the average American. It’s a result of the years Trump has spent cloistered in the world of country clubs and on-demand Diet Coke, certainly, but it’s also a result of the zero-sum worldview he’s currently exerting on America’s international relationships, particularly as they pertain to trade.
Trump believes there are winners and losers, and that just as the United States has “won” the game of geopolitics over the past 100 years, he and his billionaire friends have defeated the type of people who have to think about groceries in the game of life. In his view, the U.S. not only doesn’t owe Canada anything, it would be stupid not to use its hard-won leverage to exploit and humiliate the lesser nation. Trump sees the federal government he now controls as the ultimate tool to similarly exploit and humiliate the millions of Americans he’s bested, and he’s spent the first two months of his second administration pulling every lever he and his advisers can find to enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of all of the undeserving losers.
Trump, unlike Republicans of days gone by, doesn’t appear to feel any shame about any of this — which may explain why he has been practically taunting Americans about grocery prices, freely revealing that he thinks so little about their lives that he forgot “groceries” were even a thing until someone on his third presidential campaign told him that bringing them up could help him win. Grocery prices are a very real issue for millions of Americans, but Trump doesn’t even bother to hide that he’s more curious about how funny the word sounds to him, after all these years of McDonald’s and Mar-a-Lago table service.
Trump’s disregard for the lower classes is evident administration-wide in how brazenly his allies have acknowledged that tariffs will hurt Americans financially. Elon Musk, the billionaire who’s heading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said even before Trump was elected that Americans will suffer “hardship” as a result of the administration’s supposed effort to eliminate the national debt. The stock market started tanking after Trump took office and started wildly threatening tariffs, leading Republican lawmakers and administration officials to go on TV and reassure everyone that it’s a “transition” and that though there might be “blips,” it’s a good thing in the long run. Trump even acknowledged a coming economic “disturbance” while, contrary to his pre-campaign vows to bring prices down, suggesting America needs to be thinking about the economy with a “100-year perceptive,” like China.
Trump has continued to be evasive when asked about the bounty of evidence that tariffs will inflict economic pain — or as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) recently specified, “slow pain.” The president regularly waxes about a coming “golden age” while making vague promises of the unprecedented wealth that will befall Americans as long as they bear with him and pay out of their noses for basic goods for an unspecified amount of time. “We’re going to have Boomtown, USA,” Trump said over the weekend in response to a question about tariffs causing growth to slow. “We’re going to boom.”
Americans don’t seem to be buying any of this. Protests have roiled Republican town halls and Musk’s flagship company, Tesla. Polls show increasing anxiety about the administration’s economic agenda, including a recent Fox News poll in which 56 percent of respondents disapproved of Trump’s policies. Consumer confidence just hit a two-year low. The stock market is still tanking.
The message from the Trump administration is essentially that people should stop whining. The president and his Cabinet of billionaires aren’t merely indifferent to the economic struggles of working Americans. They resent these working Americans for wanting to live a modest life — for wanting health care, for wanting Social Security, for wanting the richest nation in the history of the world to use some of its wealth to take care of its citizens.
“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” billionaire Treasure Secretary Scott Bessent scolded during a speech at the Economic Club of New York last month.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, also a billionaire, recently scoffed at the idea that anyone could actually rely on a Social Security check, suggesting that seniors who might complain about not receiving their monthly payments are taking advantage of the system. “The easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen,” he said. “Whoever screamed is the one stealing.”
A few weeks earlier, Alina Habba — the Trump lawyer and adviser the president recently tapped as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor despite her abject lack of prosecutorial experience — took the mask off completely, mocking the idea that anyone working in the service industry could be intelligent. “You were in a bar, AOC,” a grinning Habba said in response to Fox News host Sean Hannity noting how Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) questioned Musk’s intelligence. “You were in a bar, and not to have a drink — to serve one.”
AOC brought up the exchange while speaking at a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last month. “Understand that this kind of disdain for working people by the most powerful people in this country doesn’t just come from not being raised right,” AOC said of Habba’s remarks. “It’s a shorthand for Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s entire political agenda, and a certain ugly kind of politics: lying to and screwing over working people so they can steal from our health care and Social Security and veterans care to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest and bailouts for their crypto billionaire friends. There’s a word for this: corruption.”
“Corruption” may not be as “beautiful” of a word as “groceries” — but unfortunately for the millions of Americans Trump and his administration are doing everything they can to punish, it’s never been more in fashion.
