Piers Morgan has insisted Donald Trump is not the successor to Adolf Hitler as he claimed he was asleep when the US President Elect called him - and returned the call the next day.
Last week, the TV presenter and journalist claimed he spoke to Donald Trump for 15 minutes by phone - longer than Theresa May was reported to have spoken to him.
Morgan championed Trump’s chances of winning the presidential election from its early stages.
Appearing on ITV’s The Agenda, the former newspaper editor added more colour to his anecdote - recounting how he spoke to Trump regularly when presenting a show on CNN.
Morgan said:
“Truth be known he called me on Wednesday and I was asleep - I woke up to a message saying: ‘This is the office of Donald Trump, the President-Elect, he’d like to speak with you.’
“And I was like, you know what, I’ll get back to you. I then spoke to him the next day - we had a 15 minute chat. Without going onto the detail what I can say is he was incredibly confident, very pleased about his win, very excited about the challenge.”
Trump, whose campaign was marked by his call to ban Muslims from entering the US and building a wall to block illegal Mexican migrants, has faced criticism for the figures he has appointed to his Cabinet, including a chief strategist who is labelled a white nationalist and an Attorney General who was once judged too racist to be a federal judge. But Morgan defended Trump.
“I always said to people ... he is divisive, he is challenging, he’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But I don’t think he’s the next Hitler.
“I don’t think he’s appointing a bunch of Nazis in his cabinet. I think he’s a pragmatic business guy who played very hardball to get the Republication nomination.”