DALLAS – White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was allegedly kicked out of a Lexington, Virginia restaurant this weekend over her affiliation with the Trump administration.
On Monday, the controversy had grown to involve an entirely unaffiliated restaurant and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
How'd we get here?
Sanders was ousted from the Red Hen in Lexington, whose owner told The Washington Post that some of its staff have problems with the Trump administration on gay rights and other issues.
A TMZ reporter later ambushed Cuban outside a California restaurant and asked about the incident.
“It’ll be interesting to see if the Supreme Court takes it on,” Cuban said with a laugh.
The Mavericks owner, a fiscally conservative and socially liberal billionaire who was a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, acknowledged that removing someone from a business for political reasons is a difficult subject – a "fine line," as he called it.
But he also said “more power to” the Red Hen for sticking to its guns.
“It’s a good question. You can make an argument on both sides,” he told TMZ, according to a video posted to the outlet's YouTube page. “I don’t know what I would’ve done. More power to them for sticking up for what they believe in. But on the flip side, you don’t want to extend that to minorities, LGBTQ, et cetera. So it’s hard to figure out where that fine line is.”
He was then asked if Sanders would be invited to a Mavericks game.
“Everybody’s invited to a Mavericks game,” he said.
Conservative YouTube personality Mark Dice – who insisted in response to this story that he's not "far right" – honed in on the "more power to them" comment, accusing Cuban on Twitter Monday morning of wanting to “deny Trump supporters from [Mavs] games.”
The tweet incited a flood of insults toward Cuban, but Cuban gave a similar response to Dice:
“Everyone is always welcome to a [Mavericks] game,” he wrote. “Even you, Mark!”
Cuban hasn't made any comments suggesting anyone would be turned away from a Mavs game over their political beliefs, even tweeting Monday afternoon that the country owes "a debt of gratitude to Trump voters for opening our eyes to issues many of us hadn’t recognized."
The Mavs ranked fifth in the NBA in attendance last season despite a pedestrian product on the court.
The incident involving Sanders at the Virginia Red Hen also had an unaffiliated Red Hen restaurant fighting backlash over the weekend and into Monday. Most of the criticism came through social media, but the eatery in the nation’s capital was egged Sunday night, according to USA TODAY.
“You have the wrong restaurant,” the D.C. restaurant wrote to its mistaken critics on Twitter. “Separate companies separate businesses separate owners no affiliation. That one is in Virginia. Businesses in DC are prohibited from discriminating against people for political affiliation because we are a federal district.”
President Trump didn't make things any easier, tweeting Monday about the incident without clarifying the location.
