Piers Morgan has said he “doesn’t get” US president Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as he is “actually a germaphobe”. 

The Good Morning Britain presenter, who is friends with Trump, said that he’d been “obsessive” about hand hygiene in the past, so can’t understand why he has treated Covid-19 like “a bloody casual load of nonsense”. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Piers discussed his somewhat complicated friendship with Trump, where he said: “He’s actually a germaphobe. If you coughed, it was like you’d got the plague and out would come the Purell [hand sanitiser] and he wouldn’t shake hands with people. He was obsessive about it.

“Then, when he gets hit by a real killer virus, he treats it like a bloody casual load of nonsense. I don’t get that.”

Piers has been a vocal critic of how Trump has responded to the pandemic, and slammed his “ridiculous” actions last week, when he temporarily left hospital after being diagnosed with the virus to stage a drive-by.

“What’s he doing? The whole thing is utterly ridiculous,” he said on Good Morning Britain last week. 

“This is from a president who is in charge of a pandemic which has seen more than 200,000 Americans lose their lives.”

In his interview with the Guardian, Piers also said he believes Trump “panders to racists” and would “probably not” be so tolerant of him if they were not already friends. 

However, he added: “When I came back [to the UK] from CNN, I could count on one hand the number of people who contacted me – and he did, repeatedly. For all his faults, Trump can be very loyal.”

Last week, Piers predicted misery for Trump in the upcoming US election,  blaming his “supremely selfish, narcissistic, empathy-devoid, incessantly inflammatory antics during the most difficult year most Americans have ever endured” should he lose to Joe Biden.