THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

This country is sadly burdened with an administration that lies, fucks up and otherwise makes mistakes on a scale never before seen since the Confederate States of America had their asses whipped for promoting slavery. One thing this administration almost never does is apologize for these actions.

Slowly, several of Mr. McCain’s fellow Senate Republicans — including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, John Kennedy of Louisiana and Dan Sullivan of Alaska — began to call for an apology. But relenting to others’ critiques is not the way of the Trump White House. And it is certainly not the way of President Trump. As pugilistic a president as he was a candidate, Mr. Trump’s apologies are rare.

“The president has always throughout his career had a stance of ‘never apologize, never back down,’” Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, said in an interview. Aides are “more likely to face the wrath internally” from the president for admitting a misstep than they are “fighting the media’s instincts,” he added.

This combative ethos has stood firm amid an assortment of insults and missteps. Mr. Trump and his top aides did not apologize for his disparaging remarks about Haiti and countries in Africa. He mended fences with — but stopped short of a direct apology to — Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain after retweeting anti-Muslim videos posted by an ultranationalist British group. And his remarks last year that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally that left one woman dead in Charlottesville, Va., prompted sustained criticism from Congress and many fellow Republicans, but no apology from Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump had also refused to apologize for disparaging remarks he made about Mr. McCain on the campaign trail in 2015: “He’s not a war hero,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. McCain, who was shot down during the Vietnam War and held prisoner for more than five years in Hanoi. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Even the rare mea culpa seems to bear an asterisk. In 2016, about a month before the election, when comments Mr. Trump made about grabbing women during an “Access Hollywood” segment surfaced on tape and threatened to destroy his campaign, he quickly apologized in a short video statement.

“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person,” his apology began. But by the end of the statement, he had returned to a more familiar message: “Let’s be honest,” Mr. Trump concluded, “we’re living in the real world. This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we’re facing today.”

According to a senior White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, this ethos is again behind the White House’s lack of an apology over the remark made by Kelly Sadler, a special assistant to the president, in a meeting last week.

In off-the-cuff comments that were quickly leaked to the news media, Ms. Sadler assessed Mr. McCain’s opposition to Mr. Trump’s nominee for C.I.A. director: “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’s dying anyway.”

Two other forces are driving the decision not to apologize, that official said: The first is that White House officials believe that the Obama administration apologized for the United States’ behavior on the world stage too often. And the second is a pervasive feeling of frustration among aides who fear their every word will be leaked to the news media. (An impassioned plea made last week by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, to keep internal discussions private was leaked to the website Axios by five aides within hours.)

It is enough that Obama did apologize for mistakes to make them anathema to Mango Muffinbutt. Layer that on top of his very fragile, snowflake like psyche, and the idea that anything he does needs an apology is just unthinkable.