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!"

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. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2018

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." Jeva Lange