Mr. Trump’s most highly criticized response to a racial incident came in August, after white nationalists paraded and demonstrated in Charlottesville, Va., where they were met by counterprotesters. Mr. Trump assigned blame for the ensuing violence to both groups and spoke of “very fine people on both sides.”

In other cases, he has ignored or rejected the racial tensions at the core of some high-profile, combustible public issues.

Mr. Trump has emerged as the leading critic of the practice by some N.F.L. players of kneeling during the national anthem as a way to protest racial discrimination in policing. Mr. Trump personally, and successfully, lobbied some team owners, who earlier this month created a new anti-kneeling rule. He said his objection to the protests had “nothing to do with race,” but was rather about “respect for our country and respect for our flag.”

This week, he took to Twitter to respond to the tweet by the television star Roseanne Barr in which she compared a former Obama aide, Valerie Jarrett, to an ape. But Mr. Trump did not condemn the offensive tweet, or speak about race. Instead, he used the opportunity to complain that critics who had spoken ill of him had not apologized. The president continued on that theme on Friday morning, wondering on Twitter why Samantha Bee had not been fired from her show for using vulgar language to describe one of his daughters.

Mr. Trump manages to deftly turn racial issues into left-right political fights that are race neutral, said Ernest Lyles, a black private equity partner who lives in New York. In the case of Ms. Barr’s comments, for instance, Mr. Lyles said the president turned what was simply an issue of someone making a racist comment into a battle between a liberal television network doing wrong to a Republican like him.

And Mr. Lyles, 39, said he found that unfortunate because he believed that Mr. Trump could actually do more to heal the country’s racial divide than Mr. Obama, because the people who listen to Mr. Trump are less savvy on racial issues.

“Unfortunately, for better or worse, America is trained to be more open, and more conditioned to be led by, a white male than someone who isn’t,” Mr. Lyles said.