This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utahns with a home phone may receive a recorded call from a white nationalist supporting Donald Trump and slamming Mitt Romney.
William Johnson, who leads the American Freedom Party, paid about $6,000 for the calls that are expected to hit Utah homes Thursday and Friday, between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.
He did so in reaction to Romney's highly critical speech calling Trump a "fraud" and a "phony."
"Mitt Romney said a lot of bad things," Johnson said. "Trump is a nationalist. Trump is a populist, and the mean-spirited Republicans are battling that. I had to battle back."
Johnson provided The Salt Lake Tribune with a copy of the call's script, which includes: "The white race is being replaced by other peoples in America and in all white countries. Donald Trump stands strong as a nationalist. Mitt Romney and his establishment conservatives pretend they don't care."
Johnson has produced similar robocalls in Iowa, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Vermont, according to NBCNews.
Part of Romney's critique of Trump is that the celebrity billionaire hasn't denounced racists, including a former leader of the KKK, in a widely seen CNN interview.
In his speech in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Romney warned the "exchange on the Ku Klux Klan will play a hundred thousand times on cable and who knows how many million times on social media."
He went on to say that Trump "creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants, he calls for the use of torture and for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists."