White nationalists urge support for Donald Trump in Iowa
Updated at 4:45 p.m. ET
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump insists he doesn’t want help from any super PACs but that has not stopped a white nationalist group from jumping into the Iowa caucuses on his behalf.
The American National Super PAC began making robocalls over the weekend to Iowans, urging them to caucus on Trump’s behalf. The group also is buying radio airtime in the state to push his candidacy, according to a news release issued by the American Freedom Party, which describes itself as promoting “the interests and issues of European-Americans.”
The party’s chairman, Los Angeles lawyer William Daniel Johnson, is the super PAC’s treasurer.
Trump campaign officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are battling for first place in the latest Iowa polls.
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Jared Taylor, the editor of a website called American Renaissance, helped voice the recorded message, which appears to tout Trump’s push to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States.
“We don’t need Muslims,” Taylor says on the automated call. “We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”
In an interview Tuesday with USA TODAY, Taylor called Trump a “refreshing voice of sanity” because of his stance on illegal immigration. He praised him as the only 2016 candidate willing to say that the United States is “being transformed from an Anglo-European nation to something like that in the Third World.”
Americans, he said, “don’t want to end their days in something that has turned into an outpost of Vietnam or Guatemala.”
Taylor, who describes himself as a “white advocate,” gained media attention last year as a spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose statements on black-on-white crime were cited in a manifesto linked to Dylann Roof, who is charged with killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.
Taylor said he has no official role with the council but filled in to help deal with the media barrage following Roof’s arrest.
Johnson, who is overseeing the PAC, said he funded the operation out of his own pocket and paid for about 300,000 calls.
He previously told Talking Points Memo that the group would spend about $9,000 and expand to other early voting states. On Tuesday afternoon, however, he told USA TODAY that the spending likely will not exceed $5,000 after an Iowa radio station decided to reject his buy.
Johnson also said he's been inundated with so many negative calls that he may abandon plans for a similar push in other states, such as New Hampshire.
"I just wanted to promote a Christian and white nationalist message," he said. "I just wanted to reach voters in Iowa."