'Filthy': Donald Trump slams restaurant that booted out Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Washington Donald Trump has taken to Twitter to slam a restaurant that refused to serve his press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The owner of The Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, Stephanie Wilkinson, last week asked Ms Sanders and her family members to leave the restaurant after her staff expressed their concerns about the controversial customer.
Ms Sanders tweeted about the incident, confirming she was thrown out of the eatery and saying Ms Wilkinson's actions "say far more about her than me".
Mr Trump defended his press secretary, while taking a swipe at the restaurant, a cosy, upscale venue that serves farm-to-table regional food.
He tweeted on Monday that The Red Hen "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".
He added: "I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!"
The incident comes days after protesters assailed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Washington, just as the administration was coming under fire for its policy of separating undocumented immigrant families at the US border with Mexico.
Ms Nielsen cut short the working dinner after protesters shouted, "Shame!" until she left. And Mr Trump's policy adviser, Stephen Miller, was accosted by someone at a different Mexican restaurant, who called him "a fascist," according to the New York Post.
The displays of hostility have set off a fierce debate about whether politics should play a role in how administration officials are treated in public, with Ms Sanders' father, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, denouncing his daughter's treatment as "bigotry."
Ms Wilkinson stood by her decision telling The Washington Post that her reasons included the concerns of employees who were gay and knew Ms Sanders had defended Mr Trump's desire to bar transgender people from the military.
She said knew - she believed - that Ms Sanders worked in the service of an "inhumane and unethical" administration, that she publicly defended the President's cruelest policies, and that that could not stand.
"I'm not a huge fan of confrontation," Ms Wilkinson said. "I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals."
It didn't take long before the restaurant's reviews on Yelp were jammed with opinions about the owner's move, pro and con.
Lexington, about 300 kilometres south-west of the capital, is solidly Trump country. In the 2016 presidential election, Mr Trump received about 61 per cent of the vote in Lexington to Democrat Hillary Clinton's 31 per cent.
AP , Bloomberg, Washington Post