President Donald Trump’s latest target on Twitter is the Red Hen, a Lexington, Virginia, restaurant that refused service to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Friday night.
Trump is now trying to smear the restaurant that wouldn’t serve Sarah Sanders
Meanwhile, Mar-a-Lago has accumulated 78 health code violations over the past three years.
“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 tweeted Monday morning. “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”
Whatever Trump makes of the restaurant’s exterior, it doesn’t seem that the establishment is actually “dirty on the inside.” The Red Hen’s latest inspection, in February, found no health code violations. And its history generally shows a clean bill of health, according to the Central Shenandoah Health District. (In 2017 the restaurant was briefly dinged for displaying pickles or jams that were not from an approved food processing plant.)
Trump’s tweet might have been a case of throwing stones from inside a glass house. The Associated Press reported that health inspectors cited Mar-a-Lago for 15 health code violations in January 2017. This brought the hotel’s grand total of citations to 78 in just the past three years. The report mentioned broken refrigerators, overheated stored meats, unsanitary seafood, and cooks sans hairnets.
Trump’s tweet is the latest development in a saga that began Friday night, when Sanders tweeted about being refused service at the Red Hen. Sanders lamented, “I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so” and that the Red Hen owner’s “actions say far more about her than about me.”
Sanders is not the first person in the Trump administration to experience a less-than-savory fine-dining experience. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was booed out of a Mexican restaurant on June 20. The same thing happened a day later to Stephen Miller, the man behind Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.
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