June 25, 2018

In Yelp-Style Attack, Trump Slams Red Hen Over Sanders Treatment

“Dirty on the outside, dirty on the inside!”

Michael Candelori/ZUMA

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On Monday, President Donald Trump attacked the Red Hen, the Lexington, Virginia, restaurant that refused to serve White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders over the weekend. Using his Twitter account, he accused the restaurant of being “dirty”—both in terms of its cleanliness and values.

The president’s decision to weigh in on the incident, which was the third public shaming of a Trump administration official dining out in public in the past week, escalates a controversial tweet from Sanders condemning the Red Hen after she was asked to leave Saturday over Trump’s “inhumane and unethical” policies. Ethics experts have since questioned whether Sanders may have broken the law by using her official White House account to discourage patronage at a privately owned restaurant.

Trump’s tweet Monday shows no apparent concern for such potential violations. After his morning attack, many on social media pointed to the many health code violations at Mar-a-Lago and several of the other properties he owns.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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