U.S. President Donald Trump slammed the “filthy” Red Hen restaurant that refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Friday evening.
Monday morning, the president said on social media that the restaurant in Lexington, Va., should “focus more on cleaning” rather than “refusing to serve a fine person like” the White House spokesperson.
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“The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” the president tweeted. “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”
On Saturday, Sanders said she was asked to leave the Red Hen because she worked for the president.
“Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me,” Sanders said on Twitter. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.”
The restaurant’s co-owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, told The Washington Post that her staff had called her to report Sanders was in the restaurant. She cited several reasons, including the concerns of several restaurant employees who were gay and knew Sanders had defended Trump’s desire to bar transgender people from the military.
“Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave,” Wilkinson told her staff, she said. “They said ‘yes.’”
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Wilkinson said that she talked to Sanders privately and that Sanders’s response was immediate: “That’s fine. I’ll go.”
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Photos of the restaurant taken on Saturday, show the small red building, painted with white trim with green awnings. The images do not suggest the restaurant is in disrepair.
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In April 2017, Trump’s exclusive Mar-a-Lago Florida resort faced more than a dozen health and safety violations for storing undercooled meat, potentially dangerous raw fish and broken coolers in the resort’s restaurant. The Florida Division of Hotels and Restaurants said three of the violations were deemed “high priority,” meaning they could lead to illness-causing bacteria being served in meals.
Online health inspection records show The Red Hen had two “critical” infractions in 2014 and one “priority” in 2017.
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The Sanders incident comes just days after a dozen protesters heckled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen about the Trump administration’s immigration policy as she ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.
The protesters entered MXDC Cocina Mexicana Tuesday and chanted “Shame!” and “End family separation!”
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In a video posted on Facebook by Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America, the protesters yelled, “if kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace.”
Nielsen paid her bill and left after about 10 or 15 minutes.
— with files from the Associated Press