Louis C.K.’s devolution was at once baffling and predictable. There was a time in American public life when atonement was seen as a form of strength—a way not only to own up to one’s missteps, but also to do that classic work of crisis management: control the narrative. (“I’m the responsible officer of the government,” John F. Kennedy said of the Bay of Pigs. “This happened on my watch,” Ronald Reagan said of Iran-Contra. “I take full responsibility for the federal government’s response,” George W. Bush said of Hurricane Katrina.) Bucks stopped. Power came with responsibility.

Apologetic Louis C.K. operated within that old paradigm. Apoplectic Louis C.K., however, occupies a newer one—in which the true sign of power is not responsibility but impunity.

Video: Why Fake Apologies Are on the Rise

“I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour,” Mitt Romney said, accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. “President Obama began with an apology tour.”

It was a line of attack Romney would return to many times. Obama, he argued, was that most shameful of things: an apologizer—for American history, for American values, for America itself. The mild-mannered Romney was seeking the presidency at a time when American politics was manifesting, ever more eagerly, as blood sport; mocking the sitting president as sorry in every sense was one of the concessions he made to the moment. Romney named his 2010 book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. This was a slightly subtler version of a title on a Heritage Foundation report the year before: “Barack Obama’s Top 10 Apologies: How the President Has Humiliated a Superpower.”

The current steward of American humiliation has taken the logic of sorry you’re sorry to a new extreme. Donald Trump has converted his resentment of apology into a political identity. (“He’s not into apologizing,” a former administration official told Politico. “Generally speaking, he’s not a big believer in backing down.”) This summer, after a rally in which the president mistook a supporter for a detractor and belittled him accordingly, the CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins sent a tweet: “President Trump called and left a voicemail apologizing to the man he mocked as overweight, a White House official says. He confused him for a protester last night in New Hampshire. ‘That guy’s got a serious weight problem,’ Trump said. ‘Go home. Start exercising.’ ”

Soon, however, Collins tweeted a follow-up: “Correction: Trump did not apologize, a White House official tells me. He phoned the supporter, left him a message thanking him for his support, but did not use the words ‘sorry’ or ‘apologize.’ ”

That the official felt the need to issue this clarification was telling. And it warned of an array of anti-atonements to come. In September, Trump tweeted that Hurricane Dorian, the storm then wreaking havoc in the Bahamas, would reach the shores of Alabama. This was incorrect. A different president might have acknowledged the mistake and moved on. Trump, however, took another tack—which is to say that he reportedly took a Sharpie to a poster-size model of the storm, editing the hurricane’s expert-predicted path to conform to his preferences. Public outrage only amplified Trump’s defiance, to the extent that, soon, staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were ordered to issue a statement backing up his erroneous claim. The federal agency charged with telling the truth about that most fundamental of shared realities—the weather—was made to lie so the president could avoid admitting a mistake. Atmospheric pressure can come in many forms.