Donald Trump praised the Ford Motor Company's founder Henry Ford – a notorious antisemite – for his "good bloodlines" during the president's visit to one of the automaker's Michigan plants.

The president said: "The company founded by a man named Henry Ford — good bloodlines, good bloodlines. If you believe in that stuff?" Apparently addressing William Clay Ford, the company's executive chairman and great-grandson of Henry Ford, Mr Trump added: "You got good blood."

Following the success of his revolutionary manufacturing enterprise, Mr Ford had published dozens of articles reflecting his bigotry, including antisemitic conspiracies targeting the "international Jew", before he retracted his views in the 1920s.

But Mr Ford, admired by Adolf Hitler, received the Nazi Party's Grand Cross of the German Eagle a decade later in 1938 at the onset of the Second World War.

Mr Ford also financed the publication of thousands of copies of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", fabricated antisemitic propaganda invoked by Hitler as part of his justification for the Holocaust, which saw the murder of more than six million Jews.