Fact check: Trump revives his false claim that Americans have to show ID to buy groceries

By Daniel Dale, CNN

President Donald Trump has revived one of the most bizarre false claims from his first presidency and his 2024 campaign: an assertion that Americans are required to show identification to buy groceries.

Trump was mocked when he made versions of this claim in 2018 and 2019 while pushing for stricter voter identification laws. But he said it again in 2023 as he ran for president, then said it once more on Wednesday morning while baselessly questioning the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of Republican defeats in various state and local elections the day prior.

“All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID,” Trump said Wednesday at a breakfast with Republican senators.

Americans obviously do not need to provide identification to buy groceries or gas.

Grocery stores generally require identification for purchases of alcohol or tobacco, purchases of certain medications and for the small percentage of purchases made by personal check. Stores may occasionally ask for ID under other circumstances.

But these are exceptions rather than the rule. Contrary to Trump’s claims, Americans generally buy groceries without ever having to tell anyone who they are. Similarly, millions of Americans every day buy gas without ever showing identification; many of them do not even interact with a person while paying at the pump.

In 2018, when Trump’s then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked about Trump’s initial false claim that photo identification was needed to buy groceries, she suggested he was referring specifically to purchases of beer or wine.

But he soon made clear he was actually talking about food, specifically mentioning “a box of cereal” in an interview three months later. In 2023, he falsely claimed identification was needed “if you buy a loaf of bread.”

Trump repeats other false claims about elections

On Wednesday, Trump repeated his false claim that “if you have mail-in ballots,” an election is “automatically corrupt.”

It simply isn’t. Mail-in voting is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters to cast legitimate ballots. Elections experts say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots – but also that fraud rates in major US elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots. There is no evidence that the elections held Tuesday were anything other than free and fair.

Trump also repeated his false claim that a commission led by former President Jimmy Carter “said about mail-in ballots: ‘If there is mail-in ballots, there will definitely be corruption.’”

That’s not what Carter or the commission said. Trump has repeatedly misstated the commission’s conclusions.

It’s true that the commission Carter co-chaired two decades ago was generally skeptical of voting by mail. Its 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”

But the report did not say that “there will definitely be corruption” in elections where mail-in ballots are used. In fact, the report highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections, saying that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections exclusively by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.”

The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail.

Carter, who died in 2024, said in a 2020 statement: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.”

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