Ivanka Trump claimed most Americans don’t support the progressive agenda set forth by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), which includes increasing the federal minimum wage and guaranteeing jobs to everyone in the U.S.
The senior White House adviser and eldest daughter to President Donald Trump rejected the ideology behind the Green New Deal during an interview with Fox News released Monday.
“I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something,” Ivanka Trump said of the Green New Deal’s job guarantees initiative.
“I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years,” she added. “People want to work for what they get.”
The Green New Deal, spearheaded by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), is a set of policy proposals focused on job creation through the development of the U.S. renewable energy sector.
If enacted, the deal would ensure all Americans have “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security,” according to the proposed legislation.
Over 80 percent of registered voters support the Green New Deal, according to a poll released in December conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
Some 55 percent of registered voters said they would support raising the federal minimum wage to $15, according to a Hill-HarrisX poll released in January. Another 27 percent said it should be raised but to a lesser amount.
But Ivanka Trump told Fox News that a “guaranteed minimum” isn’t popular with most Americans.
“I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want,” she said. “They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want the ability to live in a country where there’s the potential for upward mobility.”
She clarified her comments Tuesday, tweeting that she supports a minimum wage but does not support the Green New deal’s job guarantees.
“I support a minimum wage,” she wrote. “I do not however believe in a minimum guarantee for people ‘unwilling to work’ which was the question asked of me.”
Twitter users hammered Ivanka Trump, who was born into wealth and has been accused of benefiting from nepotism her entire life, over her comments dismissing the Green New Deal’s job guarantee proposal.
This story has been updated with Ivanka Trump's tweet.