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The Club for Growth, an influential anti-spending group, is warning its followers that potential presidential candidate Donald Trump is a wolf in sheep’s clothing — calling him just another “tax-hiking liberal” and a “king of protectionism” who doesn’t deserve conservative support in the next election.

Former Indiana Rep. Chris Chocola is president of the Club for Growth. (AP Photo)

“Donald Trump for president? You’ve got to be joking,” Club for Growth President Chris Chocola said. “Donald Trump has advocated for massive tax increases that display a stunning lack of knowledge of how to create jobs. His love for a socialist-style universal health care system and his alarming obsession with protectionist policies are automatic disqualifiers among free-market conservatives. This publicity stunt will sputter and disappear just as quickly as the ‘The Apprentice’ is losing viewers.”

Mr. Trump has flirted with a presidential bid for several weeks, leveling stiff criticism of the Obama administration and riding doubts about the president’s birth certificate, reviving the so-called “birther” controversy that many have considered a dead issue.

Along the way, polls suggest he’s made himself into a top contender for the 2012 Republican nomination. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows him standing third behind former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

But Mr. Chocola, a former Republican congressman from Indiana, cited passages from Mr. Trump’s “The America We Deserve,” published in 2000, in which the Manhattan billionaire advocates for universal health care, a single-payer health care system and a one-time tax increase on individuals and trusts to help close the national debt and shore up Social Security.

Mr. Chocola also pulls from a recent interview in which Mr. Trump called for heavy tariffs on Chinese imports.