Donald Trump insisted he has "tremendous support" in the United Kingdom, after being tackled by Sky News' Kay Burley in the wake of the Commons debate over whether to ban him from Britain.
The frontrunner in the race to become the Republican US presidential candidate, who yesterday won the endorsement of Sarah Palin, said he was "surprised" the British parliament had bothered discussing him.
“I have a great deal of supporters in the UK. We receive thousands and thousands of letters and emails and tweets saying 'you’re so right' and that so many people agree with me and, as you know, the whole thing went nowhere," he told Burley in Iowa.
Burley, who had worked her way to the front of the media scrum following a campaign rally, asked Trump what he thought about being called "misogynistic", "racist" and "bigoted".
Trump said: "So many people who have got upset by it because they feel the same way I do. Something is happening and it's not good. They feel the same way I do. I am honoured by the tremendous support I had in the UK. That whole thing went away. Very few people showed up to talk about it."
Burley asked if he was "hurt" by the 500,000 people who signed a petition to have him banned from Britain after he said all Muslims should be banned from the United States.
"I was sort of surprised that would happen," Trump said. "500,000 votes today is a whole different thing than it would have been ten years ago, before Twitter and all.
"I have, between Twitter and Facebook and other things, I have like 11 or 12 million people. I could get that many [500,000] with one tweet today. They made a big deal out of it. I was really honoured by the way the people stuck up for me. The people from the UK really stuck up for me and you know it."
One Briton who has not stuck up for Trump is David Cameron. In the wake of his comments about Muslims, the prime minister said the Republican was "divisive, stupid and wrong".