Trump’s sham patriotism

In his bid for the White House, Donald Trump is playing many roles: law-and-order strongman, sky’s-the-limit builder, dealmaker extraordinaire. But perhaps none is more emphatic than all-American patriot. His blood pumps red, white and blue, or so he assures us. In his dreams and decisions, he sees his country above all else. “The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponent,” he told Republicans in Cleveland on Thursday night, “is that our plan will put America first.”

But this lavishly professed love is a largely semantic affair. It’s fickle. It’s reckless. Under its guise, he’s apparently prepared to jettison values that really do make America great and alliances that really do keep America safer. His patriotism brims with grievances.

It sulks. Last week he suggested to The Times’ David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that if Russia invaded a NATO ally that wasn’t pulling its weight financially, he might not rise to its defense.

His patriotism doesn’t add up. On one hand, it leads him to echo conservatives’ long-standing charge that President Barack Obama belittles our country by apologizing too much for it. On the other, Trump told Sanger and Haberman that he’d refrain from reprimanding allies with poor records on civil liberties because the United States is no paragon.

“I don’t think we have a right to lecture,” he said. “Look at what is happening in our country. How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?”

That’s a shocking statement in the context of Republican complaints that Democrats fail to appreciate and celebrate American exceptionalism. But it’s not so surprising from Trump, who excused Vladimir Putin’s criminality by saying that we Americans aren’t ones to talk.

He was on “Morning Joe.” He’d been praising Putin’s strength. And when Joe Scarborough pointed out that Putin “kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Trump responded: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”

Plenty of Killing: That could have been the title of Trump’s convention speech, a pitch-black warning about a country soaked in blood. While it’s customary for politicians who are arguing for change to describe a troubled nation with an unsustainable status quo, Trump evoked a dystopia out of “The Hunger Games,” a land damned near unlovable.

None of the people I call patriots see America that darkly or take such an incendiary tack. But his political strategy, like so much else in his life, is about what he deems best for Trump. It’s self that he salutes, not any flag. And while he harnessed his egoism somewhat during that speech, it raged anew Friday, when he destroyed any momentum his remarks might have given him with a rambling, ranting, unnecessary news conference.

“It was the summer of Trump,” he said, complimenting the success of his campaign. “It was the autumn of Trump. It was the Christmas of Trump. It was everything.” And he attacked Ted Cruz anew, again mentioning the National Enquirer story that linked Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination and saying that the Enquirer deserves more respect than it gets.

There’s no easy way to judge patriotism, and I’m suspicious of two of the most commonly used yardsticks. But by both of those measures — a readiness to serve in the military and a devotion to domestically made goods — Trump isn’t much of a patriot.

During the Vietnam War, he used his status as a college student to receive four draft deferments. Then he got a medical exemption — something foot-related. The malady couldn’t have been all that crippling, because when he was asked about it last year, he vaguely mentioned a bone spur but failed to recall whether it was in his right or left heel. “You’ll have to look it up,” he told reporters. HIS SUPPOSED regard for the military is often lip service. If it were any match for his schoolyard nastiness, it would have stopped him from dismissing John McCain’s 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war by saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.” And if it were any match for his situational stinginess, he would have given that big charitable donation to veterans that he’d promised before journalists had to shame him into making good on his pledge.

His current vow to punish American companies that outsource jobs and to prevent them from using undocumented immigrants here in the United States rewrites his own business history, one of “putting profits, rather than America, first,” wrote The Times’ Alan Rappeport last month.

“Most of his line of suits, ties and cuff links bear a ‘Made in China’ label,” Rappeport noted. “Some also come from factories in Bangladesh, Mexico and Vietnam.” Furniture in the Trump Home collection was manufactured in Turkey, and Trump Home crystal was made in Slovenia.

Moreover, undocumented immigrants have worked on the construction of properties bearing (and blaring) Trump’s name.

You didn’t hear any of that at the convention Wednesday night, when the theme was in fact “Make America First Again,” a nod to Trump’s call for trade agreements with better terms for America and a foreign policy more narrowly tailored to American interests.

That call has been central to his political success, as conservative columnist Peggy Noonan observed in a column last spring. She noted that Trump’s proclamations “radiate the idea that he’s not at all interested in ideology, only in making America great again.” “He’s saying he’s on America’s side, period,” Noonan wrote, adding that neither Obama nor George W. Bush communicated that message as persuasively. Her column had the headline: “Simple Patriotism Trumps Ideology.”

But there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that allows someone to brag, as Trump has done, about paying as little in taxes as he can possibly get away with, and that permits him to flout an important political tradition of candidates releasing their tax returns.

There’s nothing simple about a patriotism that advocates torture, as Trump has also done, when our conduct in waging war is ideally what sets us apart from less principled countries and earns us the respect of the world.

And there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that’s really an amalgam of nativism, racism, isolationism and xenophobia and that denies this country’s distinction as a land of fresh starts, its arms open to a diverse world. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants wasn’t patriotic, nor was the Star of David in that offensive tweet.

“Patriotism,” the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It’s also a convenient cloak for a narcissist. Trump wears it shamelessly, but not so well that you can’t see through it.

It’s self that the billionaire salutes, not any flag