A Timeline of Donald Trump Discovering the Word "Groceries"

An old-fashioned word, a very descriptive word: how "groceries" became Donald Trump's personal "cellar door."

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One of my most toxic traits is that while I’m thoroughly disgusted by my country’s ongoing slide into authoritarianism (and the tackiest form of it at that), I continue to find our semi-senile discursive queen of a president endlessly entertaining. God help me for saying, but Donald Trump is very funny. Not necessarily on purpose, but the bizarre and often telling asides he lets leak out in between stock phrases and reflexive rambling do have a way of enlivening otherwise inane anecdotes about how he once called a fat guy on the phone.

“A friend of mine who is a businessman… Most of you would've heard of him — highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the ‘fat shot’ drug... I said it’s not working.”

I quote him because he’s objectively quotable. Every day Donald Trump’s very special brain produces sentences that have never before existed. He may be destroying the country but he’s reinventing language.

Of particular note in this regard was Trump turning up in the Middle East this week, describing “groceries” as if it was a word he had only just learned last week. He savored the word, he expounded — the man was downright rhapsodic about the word “groceries,” in a way he rarely is about anything.

"We have a term 'groceries,’” Trump rambled, sitting in a decorative chair near some white carnations. “It's an old term but it means, basically, what you're buying, food… it's a pretty accurate term. but it's an old fashioned sound… but, groceries are down, costs are down, eggs are down..."

Groceries? You know, that old term.

Of course, the real heads among us recognized this not only as another bizarre digression from the master himself, but as something of a callback. Trump not only comes up with these strange riffs every day, he also tends to repeat the ones that get a palpable response over and over. I tend to think of this less as a canny strategy than as a reflexive adaptation, like one of those old California Raisin toys that automatically danced when you put them near music. Hear murmur, bank speech fragment for later use. I’m not sure Trump is capable of strategy, but certainly reptilian cunning.

Here he was on April 7th:

"I said, we're gonna try to get groceries down. Right? An old fashioned term but a beautiful term. Eggs."

And again the same day somewhere else:

"Likewise, an old fashioned term that we use -- groceries. I used it on the campaign— It's such an old fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Groceries. It sort of says 'a bag with different things in it.' Groceries went through the roof and I campaigned on that, I talked about the word groceries for a lot."

I think this one is my favorite. The reverie with which he emphasizes not just the old-fashionedness of the word, but the beauty of what it means. “A bag with different things in it.” “Groceries” is like Proust’s Madeleine for Trump. The way he then pauses to admire the Matisse painting he’s created inside his own mind… it’s magical.

March 26th:

"The cost of groceries. A word that I used a lot on the campaign. It's like an old fashioned word, but it's a beautiful word, very descriptive word. The groceries are coming down, Brooke…”

A day earlier:

"They talked about the price of groceries, and how expensive it was, and I campaigned on it in all fairness, but I haven't used the word 'groceries.' It's like an old fashioned word. But really it's not. And people understand it. And I campaigned very hard on groceries."

You can tell he hadn’t quite gotten the riff worked out in this one. It’s also impressive the way he manages to contradict himself three or four times in the course of maybe ten seconds. The art is barreling forward.

“I inherited that situation, and I inherited a groceries situation. The groceries went way up. An old fashioned word, but it's a very descriptive word. Groceries went through the roof."“

That was from March 25th, and after that things get fuzzy. My wrist gets sore scrolling through the BluSky timeline of Aaron Rupar, who is either a man or a team of monkeys (the posting volume would be insane either way), but in any case the internet’s number one source for clips of Donald Trump saying “groceries.” Rupar posts on X too, which is more searchable, and one of the earliest videos I can find of Trump riffing on the word “groceries” over there is from October 2024 (not embeddable, sadly):

"You know more people tell me about groceries… the word grocery, I've heard it more in the last... year than any other word I think. Other than the word garbage, garbage... How stupid is a man to say that, right..."

Trump seemed a lot more senile before his election victory, which either reinvigorated him or coincided with him starting on a different drug cocktail. Either way, it would seem that the “old fashioned” part of the riff had yet to lodge itself in one of the waffle squares inside his brain. And yet he was already waxing philosophical about its descriptive qualities the same month.

As a Rolling Stone piece quotes him earlier in October: “The word ‘grocery.’ 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.”

The same article describes Trump adding a few more layers on a Meet the Press interview a few months later, in December: “I won on groceries,” he said. “It’s a very simple word. Who uses the word? I started using the word. ‘The groceries.’”

So far as I can tell, the “great word, a descriptive word” verbiage seemed to have congealed by late March 2025. But he certainly knew of it earlier than that, at least by his first term.

A much earlier iteration, back in 2018, saw Trump using groceries as a way to stump for stricter voter ID laws.

At a rally in Tampa, Florida, he said: "You know, if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID."

"You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture," he told the crowd at the "Make America Great Again" rally on Tuesday night.

"In this country, the only time you don't need it in many cases is when you want to vote for a president, when you want to vote for a senator, when you want to vote for a governor or a congressman. It's crazy. It's crazy. But we're turning it around."

Many articles followed (including the one linked) fact-checking Trump on this point: that you do not, in fact, need an ID to buy groceries. As if we needed a fact-checker to tell us that. Had Trump even been claiming this in earnest, or was he just using the kind of hyperbole that stand-up comics employ in riffs all the time? Impossible to tell, as Trump is both a veteran riffer and a man who has almost certainly never bought his own groceries.

With his famously limited vocabulary (similar to that of an 8-year-old, according to one study), aversion to reading, alleged dyslexia, and the fact that he was born extremely wealthy, it is perfectly conceivable that Trump only started retaining the word “groceries” when he was past 70 years old.

While it is indeed sad commentary that we’ve somehow managed to elevate someone this stupid and out-of-touch to the highest office in the land, and I probably need not include the litany of disturbing and evil things that he’s done while there (which would simply take too long to catalog), I choose to see the beauty in a 79-year-old president belatedly discovering his personal “cellar door.”

Trump is a man who for most of his life hasn’t appeared to appreciate anything — a gauche, loud, ignorant, money-and-status-obsessed teetotaler always shouting about having the “classiest” of everything despite having no discernible taste, in food, clothes, architecture, books, music, business or people. Is it possible that a man like this could accidentally discover the poetry of everyday life? And if that’s possible for him, what revelations are possible for us? It brings to mind another beautiful word: possibility.

Groceries. Such a word. How sonorous and yet descriptive. An old fashioned term, but a modern one. Simple, yet complex. A bag with different things in it. The stomach speaking, it always does. Such beautiful music.