WASHINGTON — It was not the racist comment that made the president angry. It was the apology from ABC.

Wading into a public outcry over remarks by the comedian Roseanne Barr, President Trump did not condemn the Twitter post about a black former aide to President Barack Obama that led to the swift cancellation of Ms. Barr’s ABC sitcom. Instead, he expressed his own grievances on Wednesday and Thursday with what the network’s on-air personalities have said about him, and insisted he was the one who deserved an apology.

Specifically, the president called out Robert A. Iger, the chairman of Disney, the parent company of ABC, who had phoned the former Obama aide, Valerie Jarrett, on Tuesday to apologize for Ms. Barr’s language. The president, referring to himself in the third person, complained on Twitter that Mr. Iger had “never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.”

His response was not a total surprise. Mr. Trump has reacted to other divisive events not by issuing statements of unity or moral clarity as other presidents might have done, but by finding equivalence or diverting attention. He declared last summer that there were “fine people” on both sides of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., and when African-Americans raised the issue of police brutality last fall, he attacked the N.F.L. players who knelt during the national anthem in protest.