President Donald Trump on Monday laid into a Virginia restaurant whose owner refused to serve White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders on Friday evening.
Trump, a long-ackonowledged germophobe, claimed the Lexington, Virginia eatery’s ‘filthy’ exterior is an indication that its food might not be safe to eat.
‘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!’
Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago resort was slapped with 15 separate health code violations during an early 2017 food safety inspection.
The president didn’t provide any evidence that the Red Hen’s food is unsafe to eat. A White House spokesperson didn’t respond to an emailed question about whether he has ever been there.
‘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,’ President Donald Trump said Monday, wading into a contoversy over his chief spokeswoman being refused a meal in Virginia
The ownership of the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, caught grief from President Donald Trump on Monday after refusing to serve dinner to his press secretary, Sarah Sanders, on Friday night
‘I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!’ said Trump, without making a claim that he has actually been to the Red Hen
Trump never traveled to Lexington, a rural town of 7,000 in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, during his campaign.
Trump is fond of restaurants in his own branded hotels, and of fast food joints – whose standardized cleaning and food handling protocols, he told DailyMail.com in May, 2015, make them predictably safe.
‘You know what you’re getting every time,’ Trump said then, aboard his private Boeing 757 while tucking into a Burger King sandwich after a speech in Sarasota, Florida.
‘Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, KFC. It’s predictable and fast. I travel everywhere, and if I get food from some mom-and-pop place, I have no idea what that kitchen could be like. Dirty? Clean? Who knows?’
Attacking restaurants for the cleanliness of their food could create an opening for claims of presidential hypocrisy.
Florida health inspectors cited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort with 15 violations in late January, days before the U.S. leader hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a 2017 diplomatic visit.
Still, the state inspectors allowed the luxury resort’s main restaurant and beach club grill to remain open as staff scrambled to make several immediate corrections.
Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private resort club in Palm Beach, Florida, was slapped with 15 food safety violations in early 2017, just before Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe visited
Among the ‘high priority’ problems described as ‘potentially hazardous’ were faulty fridges with meats stored well above the required 41 degrees Fahrenheit. For example, in the restaurant’s walk-in cooler the duck and beef were measured at 50 degrees, while a ham was at 57.
Other issues included smoked salmon being served without undergoing ‘proper parasite destruction.’ A handwashing sink for employees ran water that was not hot enough.
Stephen Lawson, spokesman for the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, said the violations were the result of a routine inspection and were not prompted by any consumer complaints or food-borne illnesses.
‘The infractions were corrected on site, and the establishment was immediately brought into compliance,’ Lawson said at the time.
A Red Hen employee posted online Friday night about Sanders’ ejection. She confirmed it in a tweet later.
The senior Trump aide said the restaurant’s owner asked her ‘to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left.’
‘Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so,’ Sanders added.
Red Hen co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson told The Washington Post that she had polled her employees about whether to boot Sanders out, and got an earful from those who were gay – particularly about the Trump admininstration’s policy of barring transgender Americans from military service.
Sanders has been Trump’s chief spokeswoman for more than a year, making her a lightning rod for progressives intent on making public shows of resistance against the White House
Sanders said Saturday that she was asked to leave the Red Hen because she works for President Trump, who claimed Monday morning that the restaurant’s exterior indicates its food might not be safe to eat
Sanders is a committed Southern Baptist and her father, the outspoken former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, is an ordained minister.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s official position is to ‘oppose steadfastly all efforts by any governing official or body to validate transgender identity as morally praiseworthy,’ and to ‘oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity.’
The Post’s editorial board wrote Monday that anti-Trump businesses should hold their noses and serve aides to the president – because the backlash might ultimately affect liberals when the political tables are turned.
‘Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment,’ read an editorial.
‘How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?’
The Red Hen’s stand has attracted partisan reactions from both ends of the political spectrum; one anti-Trump local left a sign outside the door on Saturday
Last week protsters from Democratic Socialists of America forced Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to leave a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., complaining loudly about the White House’s immigration policies.
Separately, a heckler targeted senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller at a restaurant.
And protesters accosted Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a prominent Trump supporter, outside a film screening Friday night.
The movie was ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor,’ a documentary about the mild-mannered children’s TV pioneer Fred Rogers
”Shame on you!’ one protester was heard shouting in a video of the inceident.
‘You’re a horrible person!’ yelled another.
Bondi told the Tampa Bay Times that the movie was ‘about anti-bullying and practicing peace and love and tolerance and accepting of people for their differences.’