President Donald Trump is a 'Good Samaritan' for the American people, according to former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton.

Carey, who preceded Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop, believes Trump offers Americans a voice.

 Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival, Carey said that far from being an aberration, Trump has been called forth by our times.

He lamented that a sensible discussion of Trump and his policies had become nigh-on impossible because of the strong reactions against him.

Mugabe, Assad and even many former US presidents are or were in fact worse than Trump, he said.

Trump, on the other hand, has struck a chord with the many Americans who feel they have been 'left behind'.

Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, who holds a doctorate from King's College London and taught at three Anglican theological colleges, said: 'Many will recoil at the identification of Donald Trump as the Good Samaritan but why not?

'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.'

He said the help being offered by Trump is 'not merely kind words. It is the promise of ongoing support.'

He spoke about the comparison that has been made between Trump's election and Brexit in the UK.

'We can see in Britain [through Brexit] we are also a divided country.

'There are deep divisions. It is shallow thinking to decry what is called populism as if populism helps us to understand what the problem is.

'Because what the American election and our Brexit revealed was the same distrust of political leadership, the same desire for a New Deal and a deep desire to recover our country.'

Although he himself would not have voted for Trump, he would have 'found it quite difficult to vote for Hillary Clinton'.

Trump's 'indifference' to conservative' Christian orthodoxy on sexuality and his 'hedonistic lifestyle' are irrelevant, he added.

'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.'

The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has spoken of how Brexit and Trump have divided people in the same way that fascism did.