By loading up on the flags, by hugging and kissing the flag, as Trump did in 2018 after a speech to the National Federation of Independent Business and again at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019 and 2020, Ms Chervinsky continued, Mr. Trump is taking the tradition a step further. "He's trying to equate himself with patriotism and nationalism," she said. And his dressing to match is, she said, "the most visual representation of that." As Henry Ward Beecher, the 19th century clergyman said in 1861, "A thoughful mind, when it sees a nation's flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself."