Todd Blanche had quite the Meet the Press appearance over the weekend. In between giving James Comey’s legal team a lot to look at, the Acting Attorney General of the United States offered a defense of voter ID laws, which, um, maybe didn’t go as well as he planned. Blanche told Kristen Welker, “Like every time you walk into a restaurant or a club, you have to show your ID. How about you have to show your ID to vote? That’s not anything that’s crazy. And that’s what we should be talking about.”
I shouldn’t have to say this out loud in the year of our lord 2026, but restaurants do not card you to walk in the door.
Bars do. Venues that serve alcohol do, sometimes. Strip clubs, famously, do. But a restaurant? The place where you go to eat food? Nobody is checking ID at the hostess stand. You just… walk in. You sit down. A server takes your order. It is one of the more accessible things you can do in American life, which is presumably why there are over one million of them.
The internet noticed immediately, and did the thing the internet does the best.
Here is the thing, though: Blanche did not come up with this on his own. He’s mimicking his boss, again. President Donald Trump, has been making equally baffling analogies about everyday commerce and identification requirements since at least 2018. Trump has repeatedly claimed when pushing voter ID laws that Americans need to show photo ID at grocery stores, incorrectly saying in at least three instances that consumers needed to show ID to buy bread or cereal. When then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to explain this, she suggested Trump was referring to buying beer or wine. Three months later, Trump clarified that he was in fact talking about a box of cereal. In 2023, the president claimed identification was needed to buy a loaf of bread. Just last November, he upgraded the claim: speaking to Republican senators at a White House breakfast, Trump said, “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.”
So Blanche’s restaurant theory is, if anything, a lateral move from the established canon of Trump-world voter ID analogies. The president covers grocery stores and gas stations; the Acting AG has expanded the universe to include sit-down dining. Together, they are painting a picture of an administration that appears to have very limited personal experience with ordinary retail transactions.
What makes Blanche’s version particularly special, though, is the specificity. He didn’t just say restaurants — he said restaurants and clubs. Which is an interesting choice of words for a man who, reportedly, has been trying since February to join the Metropolitan Club, one of Washington’s oldest and most exclusive private clubs, and is currently being blocked by at least six members who have written to the board of directors to object. A man who thinks TGI Fridays checks your ID before seating you might not fully grasp why six members of one of Washington’s oldest institutions are writing letters to keep him out.
But back to the restaurants. The voter ID-via-hostess-stand theory is not just factually wrong, it is also a little revealing. This is an administration that has spent considerable energy arguing that voting should be harder, more restricted, and more heavily policed… and the best real-world analogy its top law enforcement official can muster is a thing that does not actually happen. The premise of the whole argument, that requiring ID is simply the normal, universal American experience, collapses the moment you point out that you can walk into an Applebee’s without so much as a library card.
For what it’s worth, Blanche is not new to saying things on television that don’t survive contact with reality. This is the same man who went on CNN last fall to float the theory that people who heckled Donald Trump at a restaurant might constitute a RICO enterprise, suggesting that a statute designed to dismantle the Gambino crime family could apply to some women who yelled at the president over dinner. So maybe adding to his portfolio the bold claim that American restaurants check ID at the door is just the next evolution.
The post Todd Blanche Goes On TV To Defend Voter ID And Accidentally Reveals He Has Never Been To A Restaurant appeared first on Above the Law.
Todd Blanche had quite the Meet the Press appearance over the weekend. In between giving James Comey’s legal team a lot to look at, the Acting Attorney General of the United States offered a defense of voter ID laws, which, um, maybe didn’t go as well as he planned. Blanche told Kristen Welker, “Like every time you walk into a restaurant or a club, you have to show your ID. How about you have to show your ID to vote? That’s not anything that’s crazy. And that’s what we should be talking about.”
I shouldn’t have to say this out loud in the year of our lord 2026, but restaurants do not card you to walk in the door.
Bars do. Venues that serve alcohol do, sometimes. Strip clubs, famously, do. But a restaurant? The place where you go to eat food? Nobody is checking ID at the hostess stand. You just… walk in. You sit down. A server takes your order. It is one of the more accessible things you can do in American life, which is presumably why there are over one million of them.
The internet noticed immediately, and did the thing the internet does the best.
Here is the thing, though: Blanche did not come up with this on his own. He’s mimicking his boss, again. President Donald Trump, has been making equally baffling analogies about everyday commerce and identification requirements since at least 2018. Trump has repeatedly claimed when pushing voter ID laws that Americans need to show photo ID at grocery stores, incorrectly saying in at least three instances that consumers needed to show ID to buy bread or cereal. When then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to explain this, she suggested Trump was referring to buying beer or wine. Three months later, Trump clarified that he was in fact talking about a box of cereal. In 2023, the president claimed identification was needed to buy a loaf of bread. Just last November, he upgraded the claim: speaking to Republican senators at a White House breakfast, Trump said, “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.”
So Blanche’s restaurant theory is, if anything, a lateral move from the established canon of Trump-world voter ID analogies. The president covers grocery stores and gas stations; the Acting AG has expanded the universe to include sit-down dining. Together, they are painting a picture of an administration that appears to have very limited personal experience with ordinary retail transactions.
What makes Blanche’s version particularly special, though, is the specificity. He didn’t just say restaurants — he said restaurants and clubs. Which is an interesting choice of words for a man who, reportedly, has been trying since February to join the Metropolitan Club, one of Washington’s oldest and most exclusive private clubs, and is currently being blocked by at least six members who have written to the board of directors to object. A man who thinks TGI Fridays checks your ID before seating you might not fully grasp why six members of one of Washington’s oldest institutions are writing letters to keep him out.
But back to the restaurants. The voter ID-via-hostess-stand theory is not just factually wrong, it is also a little revealing. This is an administration that has spent considerable energy arguing that voting should be harder, more restricted, and more heavily policed… and the best real-world analogy its top law enforcement official can muster is a thing that does not actually happen. The premise of the whole argument, that requiring ID is simply the normal, universal American experience, collapses the moment you point out that you can walk into an Applebee’s without so much as a library card.
For what it’s worth, Blanche is not new to saying things on television that don’t survive contact with reality. This is the same man who went on CNN last fall to float the theory that people who heckled Donald Trump at a restaurant might constitute a RICO enterprise, suggesting that a statute designed to dismantle the Gambino crime family could apply to some women who yelled at the president over dinner. So maybe adding to his portfolio the bold claim that American restaurants check ID at the door is just the next evolution.
