Trump calls restaurant that booted Sarah Huckabee Sanders 'dirty.' Mar-a-Lago's kitchen had 13 health code violations.

(Image credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

published 25 June 2018

President Trump responded Monday to the controversy over a Virginia restaurant kicking out his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, by laying down his maxim for dining out: "If a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!"

Trump is famously a germophobe, with his favorite restaurant being McDonald's because "I like cleanliness, and I think you're better off going there than, maybe, someplace that you have no idea where the food's coming from. It's a certain standard." Of course, Trump's decision to bash the Red Hen over its aesthetic shortcomings is particularly ironic when health inspectors have dinged the restaurant at his Mar-a-Lago resort with more than a dozen health code violations.

"Inspectors found 13 violations at the fancy club's kitchen," the Miami Herald learned last spring, including three violations deemed "high priority" because "they could allow the presence of illness-causing bacteria on plates served in the dining room."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.