Polls have now emerged showing that only 55 per cent of Americans disapprove of how Trump handled the occasion. That’s roughly the same number who disapprove of Trump generally. His approval rating has stayed still. Bottom line, this seems to have been a moment when everyone gets angry, but no one changes their mind. Clearly this reveals a political culture now ossified in its polarisation. But it reveals something altogether more interesting about just how hollowed out the concept of patriotism has become. No longer does it seem to have any substantive content. It’s a posture, a set of symbols maybe, but there’s nothing behind it. That’s why it can mean such opposite things in a flash. And that’s why Trump suffers nothing for his inconsistencies. What, exactly, does Trump love about America? It’s easy to list the things he hates. Immigrants, nasty women, the courts, Congress, the intelligence services, the popular culture that is the work of liberal elites. In short, Trump seems to hate the very institutions of America and a good whack of its people. And yet his patriotism seems undisturbed by his hating just about everything that defines the country. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin after their one-one-one meeting. Credit:AP This is a new patriotism, which rather than celebrating a country’s institutions, declares in a rage that they are corrupt, then declares war on them.

We have our own, less bold versions of it here, frequently disparaging the courts, our universities, the ABC, exempting only the military and (until recently) the banks. It’s a seismic move because it means a patriot no longer owes these institutions loyalty. In a stroke, the very bedrock of patriotic commitment – the idea of loyalty to a place and its institutions – is gone, and suddenly patriotism becomes loyal to nothing. Once freed from these bonds, patriotism can very quickly mould itself into whatever shape the politics of the moment demands. Trump may be demanding more contortions than most, but it’s effortless enough because in the absence of loyalty to anything that truly constitutes the country, he is free to ask for loyalty only to himself. “Make America Great Again” implies it simply isn’t now, and can’t be until Trump saves it. It’s tempting to conclude that this new patriotism is nostalgic: that it replaces love of a place that is, with love of a place that was. And that’s true to the extent that all this railing against corrupt institutions alleges they were once to be admired. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Loading

But that misses just how willingly this patriotism is prepared to break new ground. In the space of only four years, the number of Republican voters who regard Russia as an ally has nearly doubled – now sitting at 40 per cent. America has no tradition of this. It is not a return to anything, or even to the nostalgic imagination of something. No one is pointing to the good old days of friendship with Russia. What we have instead is a broad grab-bag of rationalisations among Trump’s supporters, as reported this week in The New York Times. Note the impressive malleability: it’s a witch-hunt perpetrated by the media and the FBI; the White House staff failed to brief him; there’s a broad campaign to make Trump’s election seem illegitimate; he’s making a strategic decision to ease tensions with a nuclear power; the whole thing is overblown because meddling in elections isn’t even that bad anyway. The reasoning here is wildly divergent. Some of it – that even the integrity of American elections isn’t that serious – is far from nostalgic. The common thread is only a willingness to find something – anything – to preserve loyalty to Trump. Loading The key to this new kind of patriotism is not that it’s historical, but that it’s now purely personal. The level of devotion to Trump among his supporters is so high because it stands in for the devotion they might once have had to something far greater.

My sense is that’s because Trump’s appeal to them has been equally personal. He might lie to them, he might adopt policies that hurt them and benefit Wall Street, he might change his positions on big issues on a daily basis. What he will never do is sneer at them and call them names. If there’s a nostalgia to this, it’s that there was probably a time America didn’t do that, either. And if that America cannot be retrieved, then it can at least be embodied in a single person. That seems to be the pact: Trump will defend their honour, and they will defend him. And they will follow him no matter where he goes, even if all roads lead to Russia. What remains is a patriotism that believes in nothing, but hates everything because its believers think everything hates them. Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist and a presenter on The Project.