US President Donald Trump has been compared to the Biblical Good Samaritan by the former chief cleric of the Anglican Church.

Lord Carey of Clifton, who led the Church of England from 1991 to 2002, compared Trump with the Good Samaritan, a Biblical figure who came to help a robbery victim when no one else would.

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“Many will recoil at the identification of Donald Trump as the Good Samaritan, but why not, why not?” Lord Carey said at the Oxford Literary Festival.

“Is it not true that we have wounded and left-behind communities passed by by the elite, who are too distracted and busy with their own agendas, too busy to look over to see someone in distress?

“And intervention that makes a difference is from a totally unexpected source, the Samaritan, the outsider from a despised sect in Israel.”

When asked about the New York tycoon’s lavish lifestyle and “indifference to conservative sexual guidelines,” specifically Trump’s three marriages, the former Archbishop replied: “His attitudes are in a way irrelevant. His wealth is beyond the imagination of all of us.

“His hedonist lifestyle, his hypocrisy, the things that make him such a flawed character may also be the very thing that people today find deeply seductive.”

Lord Carey added that he “did have sympathies with the drive to elect Trump,” but would not have voted for the Republican candidate.

We learned that Trump paid 37.99 million dollars more in taxes than almost every American. What a Good Samaritan! #NotAllHerosWearCapes — Trump Pence 45 (@TrumpPence45) 15 March 2017

He also said he “would have found it quite difficult to vote for Hillary Clinton,” stressing that politics needs to be recovered for everyone.

Lord Carey’s apparent praise of the US president puts him at odds with the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who blasted Trump’s recent attempts to impose a travel ban for people from a number of predominantly-Muslim countries.

“Policies that are based in fear... will lead to terrible results,” Welby said at the time.