When "Groceries" Becomes a Tell: Trump's Fixation Reveals More Than He Realizes
Donald Trump can't stop talking about the word "groceries." Not the price of groceries—though he claims that's his concern—but the word itself. And it's getting weirder.
On November 21, 2025, during an Oval Office meeting, Trump called groceries "an old-fashioned word" while dismissing a MAGA voter's plea for help with rising food costs. This wasn't a one-off. It's become a pattern—a verbal tic that's been escalating for over a year.
The Timeline of Trump's Grocery Obsession
The fixation appears to have started during the 2024 campaign. By October 2024, Trump was already musing about how often people mentioned "the word grocery" to him. But the real escalation came after his election victory.
In December 2024, he told NBC's Meet the Press: "Very simple word, groceries. Like almost — you know, who uses the word? I started using the word — the groceries."
By March 2025, the riff had evolved. He began calling it "an old fashioned term but a beautiful term" and waxing poetic about its meaning: "It sort of says 'a bag with different things in it.'"
He repeated variations of this throughout 2025:
- March 25: "An old fashioned word, but it's a very descriptive word."
- March 26: "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."
- April 7: "An old fashioned term but a beautiful term. Groceries."
The pattern is unmistakable. Trump discovered a word—one that literally every American uses regularly—and became fascinated by it as if he'd unearthed some linguistic artifact.
What This Actually Reveals
Here's the thing: "groceries" isn't old-fashioned. It's not obscure. It's not beautiful or poetic. It's just... a word. One that appears in everyday conversation millions of times daily.
But Trump's repeated fixation on it—and his belief that he popularized it—reveals something more concerning than simple disconnection from ordinary life (though a 2010 video shows him saying he'd "never even gone to a food market" with Melania).
Mental health experts have been sounding alarms. Cornell psychologist Harry Segal points to Trump's "phonemic paraphasia—when he begins a word and can't finish it—and decline in the complexity of his words and concepts."
University of Texas psychologist James Pennebaker analyzed Trump's speech patterns from 2015-2024 and found a "staggering" decline in linguistic complexity. Trump's analytic thinking scores range from 10-24 on a scale where most presidential candidates score 60-70. "He does not think in a complex way at all," Pennebaker concluded.
The grocery fixation fits a pattern experts call confabulation—taking an idea and adding elements that didn't happen. Trump genuinely seems to believe he discovered or popularized the word "groceries." He's constructed a narrative around it, complete with aesthetic judgments ("beautiful," "descriptive") that make no objective sense.
The Dementia Question
Multiple mental health professionals have warned about signs consistent with cognitive decline. Psychologist John Gartner, who taught at Johns Hopkins, described "overwhelming evidence" of dementia, predicting Trump will "fall off the cognitive cliff."
Psychiatrist Lance Dodes, retired from Harvard Medical School, told Newsweek: "Unlike normal aging, which is characterized by forgetting names or words, Trump repeatedly shows something very different: confusion about reality."
The grocery obsession exemplifies this. Trump isn't forgetting the word—he's confused about its basic nature, its commonality, and his relationship to it. He's exhibiting what STAT analysis identified as increased tangentiality (jumping topics without connection), repetition, and "all-or-nothing thinking"—all potential markers of cognitive decline.
The Narcissism Angle
There's another explanation that doesn't exclude cognitive decline: malignant narcissism. Trump's insistence that he "started using the word" and his amazement that others use it too fits a pattern of believing he's the center of all phenomena.
In Trump's mental universe, if he noticed something, he must have discovered it. If he talks about groceries, that makes the word significant. The concept that millions of Americans have been using this word their entire lives without his involvement doesn't compute.
This isn't just ego. It's a fundamental inability to conceive of a world that exists independently of his perception of it.
Why This Matters
When a 79-year-old president repeatedly marvels at common words, confabulates his relationship to them, and shows declining linguistic complexity, it's not a quirk. It's a red flag.
Biden faced relentless scrutiny over his age and mental fitness—scrutiny that ultimately contributed to his decision not to seek reelection. Trump, now the oldest person ever inaugurated as president, receives far less examination despite exhibiting behaviors that experts say warrant "a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation."
The grocery fixation is a window into Trump's cognitive state. It shows:
- Confabulation: Creating false narratives about his role
- Tangentiality: Digressing into irrelevant observations
- Repetition: Cycling through the same riff compulsively
- Reduced complexity: Fixating on simple concepts
- Reality confusion: Misunderstanding basic facts about common words
The Bigger Picture
Trump's White House removed official transcripts from its website in May 2025, claiming "consistency." But reading his full remarks reveals the extent of the problem. During a July cabinet meeting ostensibly about Texas flooding, Ukraine, Gaza, and tariffs, Trump spent 13 minutes talking about how he decorated the room, including a soliloquy about picture frames and lamp medallions.
"Look at those frames, you know, I'm a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures," he told his cabinet as they waited to address actual crises.
This isn't normal. And the media's tendency to "sanewash" Trump—selecting his more coherent moments while ignoring the concerning ones—does the public a disservice.
What It Shows About His Mind
Trump's grocery obsession reveals a mind that:
- Struggles with object permanence: Things don't exist until he notices them
- Confabulates constantly: Creates false memories and narratives
- Shows declining complexity: Fixates on simple concepts with childlike wonder
- Lacks self-awareness: Can't recognize how bizarre his observations sound
- Exhibits possible cognitive decline: Displays multiple markers experts associate with dementia
Whether this represents advancing dementia, lifelong narcissistic pathology reaching new extremes, or both, the pattern is clear. And it's accelerating.
The man who claims groceries is "an old-fashioned word" also falsely insists you need ID to buy them—a claim he's repeated since 2018 despite it being obviously untrue. He's constructed an entire alternate reality around a mundane word, and he's governing from inside that reality.
That should concern everyone, regardless of political affiliation. Because when the president can't accurately perceive something as basic as the word "groceries," what else is he getting wrong?
