Becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee seems to have changed Donald Trump.
Shortly after his opponents Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out of the race, Trump revealed that he has flipped on one of his key policy positions: the minimum wage.
In November, Trump said unequivocally that he “would not” raise wages if elected president. But he told CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that he is now “open to doing something with it.”
“I’m actually looking at that because I am very different from most Republicans,” Trump said. “You have to have something that you can live on.”
Trump originally laid out his position on the minimum wage in during a Republican debate hosted by Fox News in November 2015. During that debate, moderator Neil Cavuto asked Trump if he could sympathize with low-income workers who happened to be protesting outside for higher pay. Trump said he could not sympathize — and that he was concerned about wages getting “too high.”
“Taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world,” Trump said at the time. “I hate to say it, but we have to leave [the minimum wage] the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratosphere. We can not do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.”
Trump’s new position on the minimum wage could be explained simply by the fact that he’s the presumed Republican nominee, and now has to appeal to a wider range of Americans for support. Multiple recent polls have shown that raising the minimum wage is popular — 97 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans support at least some kind of an increase, according to a 2015 survey by Oxfam America. An even more recent HuffPost/YouGov poll of 1,000 people taken last month found that 77 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of Republicans support an increase to about $10 per hour.
Of course, Trump’s reversal could just be a product of his malleable personality. As Trump himself said in March: “Everything is negotiable.”