Nigel Farage has said he is “absolutely delighted” that Donald Trump has won the US presidential election, describing it as “the most incredible political comeback”.

Asked how he was feeling, he told GB News: “Oh, delighted. Absolutely delighted. This is what I thought would happen, but it’s happened on a really big scale.

“The swings towards Trump are truly remarkable, so I’m thrilled by that. On a human level, for him, this is the most incredible political comeback we’ve seen in modern times.

“No one since Churchill has gone from the top to the bottom and come back again in quite this way. That’s remarkable.

“And just the number of Americans just saying, ‘Hey, you know what? We’ve had enough of the direction our government’s going in. We want somebody who gives strong leadership’.

“Whether you like him or not, he is a remarkable human being. It’s a great achievement and I’m very proud to call him a friend of mine.

“To be fair, on GB News at seven o’clock live last night, I said loudly and clearly, Trump will win. So there were one or two of us who did see where it was going to go.

“I just think that the silent majority in America and, by the way, we have the same silent majority in our country, they’ve just had enough of big governments who tax too much, who make people’s lives difficult, who over-regulate them, who pursue policies on energy, for example, that put people’s bills up.

“All of those things are there, but the crucial one to add to that is the border. Over ten million illegal immigrants have come into the United States of America since Joe Biden was president.

“People are seeing in their cities increases in crime, gang crime in particular, huge problems, and what they want is somebody to provide a solution.”

On Joe Biden’s legacy, he said: “The withdrawal from Afghanistan, which led to the Taliban taking back over after 20 years of much treasure and much blood that was shed by us and the Americans and one or two others, was clearly part of the failure.

“The fact the world is closer to a conflagration than it’s been at any point in any of our lifetimes, we put on Joe Biden.

“The fact that he changed America’s energy policy and started reducing, effectively, the amount of their own oil and gas they were producing in the rush for renewables.

“Yes, a lot is to be blamed on Biden, but it’s also this centre-left big government agenda, as I say, that over-taxes, overspends and just gets everything wrong.”

Speaking from Mar-a-Lago, he added: “Do you know over the last 48 hours, I’ve seen him a couple of times. He has been calm in the most extraordinary way. He, over the last few weeks, has shown humour in public that we’ve not seen before.

“I’ve seen it in private. We’ve seen it in public. He is now an unencumbered president who genuinely wants to make change for the good.

“And I think the really interesting thing that we’ll see is he will attack the bureaucratic administrative state that has got bigger and bigger and bigger in Washington, inside the beltway.

“And I think Elon Musk will come in and, just as with Twitter, he sacked vast numbers of people, and yet still kept the business going.

“We’re going to see that happening right throughout the public sector in America, and I very much hope that proves to be a blueprint for what we need to do in our country.”

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