Lara Trump Got Personal While Defending Ivanka’s Claim That People Don’t Want Handouts

In a Fox News interview set to air on Sunday, first daughter Ivanka Trump expressed her thoughts on the fact that the current Green New Deal plan includes a jobs guarantee. This set off a firestorm of responses, and now another member of the Trump family has weighed in. Lara Trump defended Ivanka on the Green New Deal with basically the same claim that Ivanka made: a guarantee of work would not go over well, because Americans don't want "handouts."

The debate started on Tuesday, when clips of Ivanka's Fox News interview began making their way across the internet.

“I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something," Ivanka told Fox host Steve Hilton. "I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get."

She went on to refer to the guarantee as an "idea of a guaranteed minimum," adding that people "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."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who originally put forward the Green New Deal proposal, quickly clapped back on Twitter.

"As a person who actually worked for tips & hourly wages in my life, instead of having to learn about it 2nd-hand, I can tell you that most people want to be paid enough to live," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Tuesday, along with an article about Ivanka's comments. "A living wage isn’t a gift, it’s a right. Workers are often paid far less than the value they create."

In a further tweet, Ocasio-Cortez went on to show how wages haven't risen alongside worker productivity, another issue that the Green New Deal would work to correct with its aim at “family-sustaining wages.”

On Wednesday, Lara Trump retweeted Ocasio-Cortez's tweet — reiterating Ivanka's argument while drawing from her own personal experience.

"As a person who also waited tables, was a bartender & had multiple hourly-wage jobs in my life, I can tell you that what @IvankaTrump said is absolutely right: people don’t want handouts," Lara Trump tweeted. "They want the pride of earning money, independence & supporting themselves."

At the end of her tweet she added the hashtag "#TeachAManToFish."

While the phrase "handouts" generally refers to giving a person something they haven't earned, the Green New Deal aims to build a stronger social safety net in the United States. A jobs guarantee doesn't equate free money; instead, it's a promise from the government that if you are able to work, then there will be a job for you to do — and get paid for.

And despite both Ivanka's and Lara's vague claims that Americans don't want the guarantee of a living wage, polling actually suggests the opposite is true. A 2016 poll found that 58 percent of Americans support raising the federal minimum wage, which is part of the reason Democrats in Congress have vowed to take up the cause after winning back control of the House.