President Donald Trump weighed in on the controversy surrounding the White House press secretary being asked to leave a Virginia restaurant over the weekend, saying the eatery should “focus on cleaning” instead of refusing to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
”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,” Trump posted on his Twitter account. “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”
Huckabee Sanders and other diners in her party were asked to leave by the owner of The Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., on Friday night.
”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,” Huckabee Sanders wrote in a tweet Saturday. “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.”
Stephanie Wilkinson, the restaurant’s owner, said she asked Huckabee Sanders to leave the 26-seat restaurant because of her work defending an “inhumane and unethical” administration.
Wilkinson said she confronted the press secretary.
“I was babbling a little, but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion,” Wilkinson told the Washington Post. “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.
“I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave,’ ” she told the newspaper.
The incident involving Huckabee Sanders happened just days after a crowd of protesters heckled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant on Tuesday, just hours after she defended the Trump administration’s immigration policy that led to children being separated from their parents at the Mexican border.
And last Sunday, a patron of the restaurant Espita Mezcaleria approached Trump aide Stephen Miller — a hard-liner on immigration who also decided to go out for Mexican — calling him a “fascist” to his face, a source told the New York Post.
