Trump regularly retweets Katie Hopkins and called her 'respectable' - in reality she is a marginal figure who called migrants 'cockroaches' and once claimed to be the 'the new Jesus'

Hopkins' first major controversy came in 2013, when the then-Daily Mail columnist appeared as a guest on ITV show, This Morning.

She told the show that she judged which kids were suitable for her children to play with by their names, and linked names of children to social class.

"I think you can tell a great deal from a name," she told hosts Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.

"For me, a name is a shortcut of finding out what class a child comes from and makes me ask: Do I want my children to play with them?"

"When I hear screeched across the playground: 'Tyler! Come back 'ere.' It's the Tylers, the Charmains, the Chantelles, the Chardonnays'."

She also said she dislikes it when children have the same names as places.

Schofield later pointed out that one of her children was called India.

Hopkins' controversial remarks — often publicised on social media — led her to quickly become one of the UK's most contentious figures on screen and in print.

In July 2013, she tweeted that babies with red hair were "much harder to love" than other babies.

Ginger babies. Like a baby. Just so much harder to love.

In 2014, Hopkins announced that she would prove her belief that obese people were "lazy" by deliberately gaining and losing 50 pounds, for a documentary called "My Fat Story."

She said: "Britain is eating its way to obesity and struggling to do anything about it. But in the vast majority of cases, the solution is simple."

She added: "Overweight people should eat less and move more and stop blaming everyone else for problems they can control. To prove that losing weight is not as hard as some people make out, I'm going from underweight to overweight and back."

The documentary was released in January 2015.

Around the time of "My Fat Story" being released, Hopkins was a contestant on a celebrity edition of reality TV show, Big Brother. She was the first celebrity to enter the house.

She got to the show's final but was defeated by the model Katie Price.

In March 2015, Hopkins wrote that Ed Miliband, who had spoken about his Jewish parents' escape from Nazis during the Second World War, could "gas" Justine, his wife. Miliband was leader of the Labour Party at the time.

Hopkins tweeted her followers: "Pollsters say Justine is the least popular of the party wives."

"He might stick her head in the oven and turn on the gas."

The former Apprentice star denied suggestions that the tweet was antisemitic, and claimed it referred to the couple's two kitchens.

Hopkins also pledged to "leave" the UK if Miliband had won the 2015 general election and became prime minister. (He didn't win.)

The former Celebrity Big Brother contestant outraged charities when she said people suffering from dementia should not be blocking beds.

"Dementia sufferers should not be blocking beds. What is the point of life when you no longer know you are living it?," she tweeted.

"Bang me over the head."

George McNamara, head of policy and public affairs at Alzheimer's Society, said: "These disgraceful remarks only serve to reinforce the stigma that sadly prevents many people with dementia from feeling like valued members of society."

In 2015, Hopkins compared refugees to cockroaches.

"Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit 'Bob Geldof's Ethiopia circa 1984', but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors," she wrote in a column for the Sun newspaper.

She suggested in the same article that gunships should be used to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach western Europe.

The United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights criticised the article, comparing it to Nazi propaganda. Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein wrote: "The Nazi media described people their masters wanted to eliminate as rats and cockroaches. This type of language is clearly inflammatory and unacceptable, especially in a national newspaper."

Speaking at a conference in London at the height of her celebrity, Hopkins said her mission to push back "the walls closing in on freedom of speech," made her "new Jesus."

She said: "I'm Jesus of the outspoken... Jesus had his followers – I have 600,000 followers on Twitter. It's about leading the way – I am the new Jesus."

When he was a US presidential candidate, Trump tweeted his approval of Hopkins in 2015, calling her a "respected columnist." Trump thanked her for defending him in an article which said that his views on Muslims reflected the views of millions of Americans.

In her article, Hopkins defended Trump's policy of a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants.

Hopkins wrote: "Trump wants to call a temporary halt to Muslim immigration until America figures out what is going on.

"Adversaries may be quick to jump on Trump and make him the problem.

"But look around. You are too busy gazing at the fluff in your navel to see the gangrene in your foot."

She praised Trump for "providing leadership" on terrorism unlike former president Barack Obama, whose approach made her want to "wrap a suicide vest around my head and text BOOM to my brain."

She also attacked multiculturalism in the UK and blamed it for Islamic terrorist attacks there and in Europe.

In a 2015 column for the Mail Online website, Hopkins wrongly suggested that a Muslim family who had been denied entry to the US were extremists and had links to Al Qaeda.

After a legal complaint, Hopkins was forced to apologise to the family, and the MailOnline paid £150,000 in libel damages to the Mahmood family.

The family of 11 had planned a holiday to Disneyland in Florida but were stopped by US authorities at Gatwick Airport.

Hopkins had written afterwards: "You can't blame America for not letting this lot travel to Disneyland — I wouldn't either."

Twenty-three people died in a suicide bombing attack in Manchester perpetrated by radical Islamists in May 2017. In the aftermath, Hopkins said in a now deleted tweeted: "22 dead — number rising. Schofield. Don't you even dare. Do not be a part of the problem. We need a final solution Machester [sic]."

The final solution was a Nazi plan for the genocide of Jews during World War II.

Several complaints were made to the Metropolitan police about the tweet.

The broadcaster LBC, which employed Hopkins, fired her the same week, prompting "loud cheers" from the newsroom, according to the BBC's media editor Amol Rajan.

Six months later, she parted ways with Mail Online — a sister outlet of The Daily Mail newspaper — for which she had written a regular column. The publication decided not to renew her contract.

Hopkins lost two jobs in the space of six months following her "final solution" tweet.

In March 2018, Hopkins lost a libel lawsuit filed against her by writer Jack Monroe. She also later failed to win permission to appeal the ruling, which landed her with a bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages and legal costs.

Hopkins had falsely implied that Monroe, a food writer, backed the defacement of war memorials by protesters. Monroe originally asked Hopkins to apologise and donate £5,000 to a migrant charity, but Hopkins refused.

She was subsequently forced in September to apply for an insolvency agreement in a bid to avoid bankruptcy, and she sold her Devon home.

People were quick to remind Hopkins that in 2014, she tweeted: "The only thing people in debt have in common other than bad money management, is an ability to blame anyone but themselves."

Hopkins has recently reinvented herself as a commentator on US issues, frequently appearing on Fox News and espousing positive views of Trump and his policies.

Her frequent tweets in support of the president appear to have won his admiration — and retweets.

Trump last week shared a tweet from Hopkins which described the city represented by a black congressman he has repeatedly attacked as a "s***hole."

Last month, he retweeted an attack by Hopkins on the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who is Muslim. Hopkins said that rising crime had turned London into "Khan's Londonistan."

In a personal comment attached to the tweet, Trump said: "With the incompetent Mayor of London, you will never have safe streets!"

She has described far-right political commentator Ann Coulter as "her sister."