President Trump’s losing bid for re-election has done more than propel Joe Biden toward the White House, reports Politico. It has returned the Stars and Stripes to millions of anti-Trump Americans.

“Across the country, in their cautious euphoria after the election, foes of Trump have been embracing the flag in similar ways: unfurling it in front of their homes, waving it in the streets, or simply looking at it differently,” the political website says.

It relates the story of Curtis Woodall of suburban Columbia SC, who took down his flag about a year into the Trump administration because he didn’t want his neighbors to think he approved “Trump’s racial rhetoric or anti-immigrant policies.”

The 72-year-old Vietnam War veteran didn’t want to do it.

“It hurt. It did,” Woodall said.

But now he has a new flag, ordered shortly before Election Day, and he flies it proudly.

The Stars and Stripes has been politicized many times in the past, but Trump took it much further than other presidents.

He “acted out his own embrace of the flag in a way that was both knowing and grotesque,” Politico says, recalling Trump’s appearance early this year at the conservative CPAC convention:

“When he finished his speech … Trump famously strutted up to a flag onstage, hugged it, kissed it, and mouthed, ‘I love you, baby.’”

For Trump’s supporters, as well as his opponents, “the flag had been recast as a kind of shorthand, an extension of the MAGA hat — sending an instant message of which side you were on,” Politico says.

“When I saw somebody with a flag bumper sticker or a T-shirt with a big flag on it, I immediately thought … it’s a Trump nut job. A crazy person,” Ed Kamen, a California screenwriter, told the website.

But after Election Day, the flag suddenly meant something different to him.

“My attitude’s changed about it now,” Kamen said. “I am proud of my country. I love my flag. I love my country. And it’s nice to see the flag again representing the country as a whole, instead of one section of it.”