It’s the same thing. People tend to think of countries as monoliths, they don’t separate the people from the government, they don’t separate regions of people, they don’t separate events from the people. They think of it as one thing, England, France, America, all mono-units. So when the government does bad things, as ours so frequently does, people think “America bad”; when they run into people from one of the more “abrupt” regions they think “America rude”; when some tragic event happens in a small town on the East Coast they think “America armed and dangerous”.
It’s a natural byproduct of the way our brain works, it doesn’t like gray areas, it doesn’t like complex concepts, it doesn’t like dealing with large numbers doing disparate things. It likes large, singular, easily defined blocks. And when one section of that block has been borderline evil for their entire lives then it brands the block. In the minds of people that aren’t going out of their way to separate the parts America’s government is America.
You're still not getting it.
It isn't about why Americans don't trust their government. No one should trust his government. I'm scared to death of my government, but I don't hate my country.
Moreover, you're missing the point that the promoters of this hatred of America are the very people who rule it. Most elites and tyrants use patriotism as a justifying ideology; this is probably the first time in history a nation's own native governing class has made use of self-hatred as a justification of its rule.
Of course, if the John Birch Society was right back when I was a member and Communism was secretly run by David Rockefeller and the Old American Establishment, then anti-Americanism would make good camouflage to hide the fact that through Communism America was taking over the world.