Earlier this month, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said that it was the job of white nationalists like himself to give Donald Trump “space” so that he can eventually publicly embrace anti-Semitism.

Jared Taylor, the leading white nationalist who heads the organization American Renaissance, expressed a similar hope in a May 16 interview on an “alt-right” podcast, saying that he could “imagine” a scenario in which Trump, once president, would publicly back “white people wanting to remain a majority in their own country” and endorse bogus theories about racial differences in intelligence. Taylor also predicted that Trump would hire people “at all sorts of levels in his administration” who “think the way we do.”

The blog Hail to the Gynocracy, which tracks the alt-right, captured segments of the interview that Taylor gave to the “This Alt-Right Life” podcast, hosted by Matt Forney.

“I’m more optimistic now than I have been at any point in 25 years of trying to wake white people up to this terrible crisis that they face,” Taylor said. “I think that Donald Trump is certainly an important ingredient in that.”

Trump, Taylor said, is saying things that he has been saying for years, only it’s impossible for people to ignore him because he’s raising these questions at “a level at which they’ve never been raised ever before.”

Transcript courtesy of Hail to the Gynocracy:

I’ve been saying for 25 years we don’t need any more Muslims, but I can be ignored. The SPLC can say I’m a hatemonger and then people will ignore me. The SPLC can say all it wants that Donald Trump is a hatemonger, but if he is the Republican nominee, then he is in an entirely different position. And when people start thinking in those terms, Well, wait a minute, are Muslims really of any use to the United States? Then the next step, of course, is to say, Well, are there any other groups that are of no use to the United States? What do, oh, Guatemalans, for example, bring to our country? What do Somalis bring to our country? What do Haitians bring to America? Do we really need 30,000,000 Mexicans living in this country? When you start thinking in terms of group differences, then the camel’s nose is under the tent. That opens the door to all kinds, all kinds of anti-orthodox, subversive thinking. And so Donald Trump has played a huge role in breaking down the gates of orthodoxy and making it possible to raise these questions in a way that they’ve never been raised, at a level at which they’ve never been raised ever before.

Taylor said that although Trump is not a “sophisticated racialist,” he has “good instincts.” He said he could imagine a scenario in which Trump goes beyond his promises to deport undocumented immigrants and ban Muslims from entering the country and specifically embraces white nationalism.

I think that he has committed himself so strongly to those ideas that it would look very bad if he were to back out on them. Even if he did only those things and nothing more, that would be a radical transformation of the way America does politics when it comes to immigration, and that would be a wonderful thing. We can then imagine a Donald Trump who goes even further. Donald Trump is the only candidate in the last 50 years of whom I could realistically imagine his tossing off to a group of journalists a question such as, Well, what’s wrong with white people wanting to remain a majority in their own country? I can imagine him saying that. He will not necessarily, but I can imagine it. I cannot imagine any other candidate ever saying such a thing. I can even imagine him saying, Well you know, ultimately, you just can’t expect as many blacks per capita to be in the advanced placement courses because they’re just not as smart. I mean I can imagine that with a little bit greater difficulty than the remark about being majorities, but that too is not an utterly inconceivable thing for Donald Trump to say. And if the president of the United States makes remarks of that kind, they simply cannot be brushed aside.

Taylor added that he was confident that a Trump administration would be stacked with people who “think the way we do” and “read our web pages” and “listen to our podcasts.”