Being Trump means never having to say you’re sorry The president is refusing to apologize for his Muslim ban talk – even though it could help save his travel ban.

Donald Trump has been president 465 days.

He’s traveled to more than a dozen countries, tweeted hundreds of times and uttered tens of thousands of words. But very seldom has he expressed regret.


Even more infrequently has he apologized.

“He’s not into apologizing,” a former Trump administration official said, bluntly. “Generally speaking, he’s not a big believer in backing down.”

Trump didn’t back away amid calls to apologize for his remarks following deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va. He refused to distance himself from his repeated inaccuracies about widespread voter fraud. And, more recently, he blamed a corrosive and cutthroat culture in Washington — not his own administration’s lack of vetting — for the derailment of White House physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to run the Department of Veterans Affairs.

On Monday, Trump again rejected any show of penitence, saying “there’s nothing to apologize for” when asked if he would disavow his past incendiary comments on a Muslim ban as a way to potentially salvage his broader travel ban policy.

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The issue resurfaced after Chief Justice John Roberts asked during a Supreme Court hearing last week if a public disavowal by Trump of his campaign rhetoric demanding a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. would alleviate concerns about the travel ban’s constitutionality. The attorney challenging the ban to say that it would.

But Trump, when given the opportunity on Monday to offer some version of a public disavowal, instead offered a stiff upper lip.

“There's no reason to apologize. Our immigration laws in this country are a total disaster. They're laughed at all over the world, they're laughed at for their stupidity. And we have to have strong immigration laws,” Trump said, when asked at a news conference about the Supreme Court comments. “So I think if I apologize, wouldn't make ten cents worth of difference to them. There’s nothing to apologize for.”

Trump’s comments could, once again, complicate the administration’s effort to defend his policy in court, throwing in doubt one of his major campaign promises.

The travel ban was among the first policy steps announced by the president and has proven to be among the most difficult to implement. Initial versions of the ban faced immediate legal challenges, were struck down by courts and then replaced by the administration, restarting the cycle as the policy made its way towards last week’s Supreme Court hearing.

The latest version of the policy, released last September, targets eight nations, six of which have majority-Muslim populations.

While Trump has refused to walk away from his tough campaign talk on banning Muslims, his allies have tried to do the job for him.

Last May, on the same day a travel ban case was being heard by a federal appeals court in Virginia, a written statement calling for “a total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States” disappeared from the Trump campaign website.

And at the Supreme Court arguments last week on the latest version of the travel ban policy, a major point of contention was whether Trump’s campaign-trail remarks should be used to judge his current policies. A lawyer defending the ban insisted Trump has repudiated his call for a “Muslim ban.”

“The President has made crystal-clear on September 25 that he had no intention of imposing the Muslim ban,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco said, apparently referring to the structure of the travel ban order Trump signed last September.

“He has made crystal-clear that Muslims in this country are great Americans and there are many, many Muslim countries who love this country, and he has praised Islam as one of the great countries [sic] of the world,” Francisco added.

The Trump administration attorney’s comment prompted questions to the White House about whether the president has, in fact, decided that he was wrong when he called during the presidential campaign for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the answer to that question was clear, but she never quite articulated it.

“The focus of this travel ban has been on safety and security, is limited to a small number of countries, and a lot of Muslim-majority countries have the same abilities to travel to and from the United States as they did in previous administrations,” she said during a press briefing last week. “I think that alone, in action, answers your question clearly.”

The White House has characterized the travel ban as a national security necessity, with officials stating that the policy was built based on a global review, thus rendering Trump’s own remarks irrelevant.

The former administration official stressed that the other instances in which the president refused to apologize were different — going as far as calling the latest push for clarity on his Muslim ban comments a “political play” to make him look bad that would ultimately have no sway over judiciary.

“They are trying to get Trump to say something everyone in the world knows he’s not going to do,” the official said. “And, the fact of the matter is it’s not going to matter.”

Still, Trump’s legal opponents pounced on his statement Monday.

“The President’s refusal to apologize for his past hateful comments only further demonstrates how much it truly is a Muslim Ban,” Mana Kharrazi, executive director for the Iranian Alliances Across Borders, which successfully challenged the ban in the Fourth Circuit, told POLITICO.

“His actions should be as telling for the courts as they are for his voter base, and for supremacists perpetrating violence against our communities,” Kharrazi added.

