On July 24, 2017, President Donald Trump looked out at a crowd of tens of thousands of Boy Scouts, gathered for their quadrennial jamboree, and told them how glad he was to leave the partisan warfare of Washington behind. “Who the hell wants to speak about politics when I’m in front of the Boy Scouts? Right?”
Wrong. Trump proceeded to deliver a 40-minute speech to the crowd, interspersing his respectful, scripted remarks with long tangents. Perhaps the strangest was an inspirational story from the president’s own youth, about a long-ago cocktail party featuring “the hottest people in New York,” hosted by TimeWarner’s Steve Ross. “He had a lot of successful people at the party,” the president of the United States boasted to the Scouts. “And I was doing well, so I got invited to the party. I was very young.”
But most of Trump’s improvisations were baldly political. He revisited the glories of Election Night, decried “fake news,” raged against the War on Christmas, disparaged his predecessor, and questioned the loyalties of civil servants. His campaign-style speech was such a breach of tradition and decorum that the chief scout executive rushed to apologize for the “political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree.”