Former archbishop of Canterbury compares Donald Trump to Bible's Good Samaritan

Despite his falling numbers in popularity polls, US President Donald Trump continues to earn support, with the former archbishop of Canterbury recently comparing him to the Good Samaritan from the parable in the Bible. Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival, Lord Carey of Clifton commended the president for giving a voice to the "wounded and helpless left behind by the elite".

"Many will recoil at the identification of Donald Trump as the Good Samaritan but why not, why not?" he said while speaking at Worcester College, on 30 March. "Is it not true that we have wounded and left-behind communities passed 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," he added.

Carey compared the American public to the man who was robbed and beaten and was ignored by two other passers-by. He said that like the Samaritan who stopped to help, Trump was offering the people more than kind words. "It is the promise of ongoing support," he said, adding that his other highly criticised comments and actions were "irrelevant".

"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 former leader of the Anglican Church said, explaining that while he would not have voted Trump's way, he would have found it difficult to choose presidential contender Hillary Clinton.

Unlike Carey, the current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has voiced his criticism of the US president, claiming that the country leader was part of the "fascist tradition of politics".