Most presidents avoid politics when speaking to the national convention of Boy Scouts known as the Boy Scout Jamboree. And when he took the stage Monday, President Donald Trump promised he would do the same.
“I said, who the hell wants to speak about politics when I'm in front of the Boy Scouts? Right?” the president asked the crowd.
From another president, casually dropping a mild curse word to an audience of kids would have been the headline. But Trump was just getting started: He proceeded to talk politics for most of the rest of the speech. He used it to attack former President Obama and Hillary Clinton, relive election night 2016 for the umpteenth time, complain about Washington, and slip in a threat to fire one of his Cabinet members.
It was a bizarre moment even by the standards of Trump’s norm-breaking presidency. Trump treated a captive audience of Boy Scouts like a crowd at one of his freewheeling campaign rallies. Where past presidents who addressed the jamboree spoke about values like honor and perseverance, Trump made the speech all about him: his crowd size, his election night victory, his nicknames for Washington, even his past adventures at New York cocktail parties.
1) Trump claimed the press would downplay the crowd size
About 30,000 scouts showed up to the National Jamboree event, which happens every four years. Trump used that as the basis of an attack on the media he rolled out often during the campaign: that they’d underreport his crowds.
“Boy, you have a lot of people here. The press will say it's about 200 people. It looks like about 45,000 people. You set a record today,” Trump said at the beginning of his speech.
He wasn’t done. Throughout the speech, he repeatedly accused the media of not accurately representing crowd size at this speech or others before it. As he did at many 2016 campaign rallies, Trump repeatedly commanded camera crews to pan over the entire crowd.
“Turn those cameras back there, please,” he said. “By the way, what do you think the chances are that this incredible, massive crowd, record-setting, is going to be shown on television tonight? One percent or zero? The fake media will say, ‘President Trump spoke’ — you know what is — ‘President Trump spoke before a small crowd of Boy Scouts today.’ That's some — that is some crowd. Fake media. Fake news.”
The room was packed with thousands of Boy Scouts because the jamboree is a big event drawing crowds from all over the world. But Trump made it all about himself.
2) He joked about firing his health and human services secretary
Attorney General Jeff Sessions apparently isn’t the only one who needs to worry about job security in the White House these days. After running down a list of his Cabinet members who served in the Boy Scouts, Trump landed on US Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
Nodding to the tough vote to repeal Obamacare scheduled in the Senate Tuesday, Trump joked that he might just fire Price if the secretary couldn’t convince enough senators to vote for the bill.
“By the way, are you going to get the votes?” Trump asked Price. “He better get them. He better get them. Oh, he better. Otherwise, I'll say, ‘Tom, you're fired.’ I'll get somebody.”
Trump also named West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a key holdout on the Senate bill so far, saying Price “better get Sen. Capito” and others to vote for the repeal bill.
This came right after he talked about how many members of his Cabinet were Boy Scouts.
3) He suggested calling Washington “the sewer” instead of “the swamp”
“You know, I go to Washington and I see all these politicians, and I see the swamp, and it's not a good place,” Trump said. “In fact, today, I said we ought to change it from the word ‘swamp’ to the word ‘cesspool’ or perhaps to the word ‘sewer.’ But it's not good. Not good. And I see what's going on. And believe me, I'd much rather be with you, that I can tell you.”
4) He revisited election night, or “that night with the maps”
Boy Scouts were also treated to a crash course on Electoral College Math 101, state by state. Then Trump thanked an audience composed largely of children too young to vote for voting for him.
“But you remember that incredible night with the maps, and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red it was unbelievable. And they didn't know what to say,” he said.
Trump then claimed that winning the electoral vote was much more difficult than Clinton’s achievement of winning the popular vote. Then the president literally ticked down a list of states that he won.
And you know we have a tremendous disadvantage in the Electoral College — popular vote is much easier. Because New York, California, Illinois — you have to practically run the East Coast. And we did. We won Florida. We won South Carolina. We won North Carolina. We won Pennsylvania. We won and won. So when they said there is no way to victory, there is no way to 270, I went to Maine four times because it’s one vote, and we won. But we won — one vote. I went there because I kept hearing we’re at 269. But then Wisconsin came in. Many, many years — Michigan came in. And we worked hard there.
5) He told a rambling story including a cocktail party with “the hottest people in New York”
The oddest thing about Trump’s speech was its attempt to combine platitudes about the Boy Scouts with his usual red-meat rally applause lines. Occasionally it veered off the rails entirely. After talking about the importance of momentum to success, Trump started in on an anecdote about a developer who built a successful company, then sold it, then got bored in retirement:
He got bored with this life of yachts, and sailing, and all of the things he did in the South of France and other places. You won't get bored, right? You know, truthfully, you're workers. You'll get bored too, believe me.
And the developer bought back the company and failed badly, Trump said:
And I saw him at a cocktail party. And it was very sad because the hottest people in New York were at this party. It was the party of Steve Ross — Steve Ross, who was one of the great people. He came up and discovered, really founded Time Warner, and he was a great guy. He had a lot of successful people at the party.
And I was doing well, so I got invited to the party. I was very young. And I go in, but I'm in the real estate business, and I see a hundred people, some of whom I recognize, and they're big in the entertainment business.
And I see sitting in the corner was a little old man who was all by himself. Nobody was talking to him.
Trump eventually got back to his point — the developer lost his momentum, and so couldn’t succeed — but it was a long, rambling anecdote that was, to say the least, a little out of place at a gathering of Boy Scouts where past presidents usually talked about things like duty, honor, and perseverance.