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 on 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 five and a half 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’s Alan Rappeport last month.