White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was informed that she could not dine inside a Lexington, Virginia, restaurant on Friday evening due to her role with the "inhumane and unethical" Trump administration.
Sanders promptly left the restaurant and announced the news in a tweet on Saturday morning in which she also said the restaurant owners' 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 wrote.
Sanders' tweet, according to one leading ethics expert, violated ethics laws because she used her government account.
Stephanie Wilkinson, the co-owner of the Red Hen, received a call while she was at home at around 8 p.m. on Friday. The chef on the other end told her that Sanders, along with her family, showed up at the farm-to-table restaurant. In disbelief, Wilkinson drove to the Red Hen to see it for herself.
While Sanders and her family ate from cheese boards, Wilkinson huddled with her staff.
"Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave," she asked her employees, according to the Washington Post. Many of the Red Hen's employees are gay, and were appalled by the Trump administration's actions against the LGBTQ community, such as his transgender military ban.
Wilkinson approached the table Sanders was sitting at and asked for a word with her in private.
"I’m not a huge fan of confrontation," Wilkinson told the Post. "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."
Lexington, a pale blue dot in a sea of red, is a city of 7,000 that rejected Trump in the 2016 election, despite being inside a county that overwhelmingly supported him, the Post reported.
"I said, 'I'm the owner,'" she recollected. "'I’d like you to come out to the patio with me for a word.'"
Wilkinson continued. "I was babbling a little, but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion. 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,'" the Red Hen co-owner said.
Without any hesitation or fuss, Sanders replied, "That’s fine. I’ll go." She and her her family left, despite Sanders being the only one asked to leave, and the group also offered to pay for some of the food that had already been served to them but were told it was on the house, the Post reported.
"I would have done the same thing again," Wilkinson said of her decision to boot Sanders. "We just felt there are moments in time when people need to live their convictions. This appeared to be one."
But Sanders is hardly the only Trump administration official who has had to face staunch public opposition as of late. As the Trump administration faced fierce pushback over its family separation border policy, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was dining at a Mexican restaurant in Washington D.C. last Tuesday when activists publicly demanded she leave, which she eventually did.
Last week, the New York Post reported that Senior policy adviser and key immigration policy architect, Stephen Miller, was also dining at a Mexican restaurant when a patron called him a "fascist."
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