In reality, it makes things worse. It seems we have reached a point where the president of the United States is considered such a snowflake by his own staff members that they tripped over themselves to avoid having him even see the name of someone he didn’t like — a Navy hero tortured in a North Vietnamese prison while the future president’s bone spurs kept him out of the service — that was inconveniently emblazoned on a destroyer within his line of sight.

It’s no secret that Mr. Trump’s ego is fragile. At the start of his tenure, he was so upset that his inauguration crowd had been smaller than Barack Obama’s that he had his press secretary lie about it and prompted the park service to edit photos to make his crowd look larger. Similarly, unable to cope with having lost the popular vote, the president formed an “election integrity” commission to try to prove that the election had been riddled with fraud on behalf of Hillary Clinton. It found none and was dissolved.

Two years on, the situation has become more absurd. Staff members have so internalized their boss’s vanities and petty grudges that they scurry to avoid anything that might offend his sense of self. The McCain episode may sound largely harmless, even if it showed further politicization of the military. This was, after all, the same event at which some service members were photographed wearing patches with an image of the president surrounded by the words “Make Aircrew Great Again” — a play on Mr. Trump’s MAGA campaign slogan. So it may be too much to expect anyone in this administration to think twice about such niceties.

But other instances of the president’s fragility are deadly serious. In late April, it came to light that the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, had warned Kirstjen Nielsen, then the homeland security secretary, against raising the issue of Russia’s attempts to interfere in American elections in front of the president. Ms. Nielsen was desperate to get the White House to show leadership and focus public attention on this critical threat. But Mr. Mulvaney told her that the entire issue was tangled up in Mr. Trump’s brain with questions about the legitimacy of his 2016 victory .