Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
President Donald Trump took a break from cyberbullying Jeff Sessions on Monday to speak at the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia. And while he kicked off the thing asking, "Who the hell wants to speak about politics when I'm in front of the Boy Scouts?" he quickly answered his own question by launching into a rambling diatribe aimed at Hillary Clinton and "fake news."But in the midst of what became a standard Trump screed, he realized he was speaking to a crowd of about 25,000 12- to 18-year-old boys and pivoted to story time. For a strange few minutes, Trump channeled his inner Spalding Gray. But rather than reminisce about buying cabins upstate or Pol Pot like Gray, Trump delivered a rambling, cautionary tale about a rich real estate friend named William Levitt who had too much fun."[Levitt] sold his company for a tremendous amount of money," Trump said. "And he went out and bought a big yacht, and he had a very interesting life. I won't go any more than that, because you're Boy Scouts so I'm not going to tell you what he did."But Levitt apparently got tired of this interesting life—which likely involved wearing boat shoes and some shenanigans not appropriate for virgin ears—and it all collapsed around him.
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In the end he failed, and he failed badly. Lost all of his money. He went personally bankrupt, and he was now much older. 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 very sad, and I never forgot that moment. And I thought about it, and it's exactly true. He lost his momentum.
And like that, story time was done, and Trump vaulted back into his standard tirade about his haters and thanking the crowd of children for voting for him. But let's pause for a second and consider this tale about momentum, about a rich guy getting lost in the sauce. Is this the kind of story Trump thinks kids should hear? Does he tuck Barron into a giant gilded bed inside a lonely gilded bedroom and talk him to sleep with memories of sex yacht parties? Is this the beginning of Trump's backup career as Roald Dahl for rich kids?Successful story time or not, the speech was not particularly well-received—especially the moment where Trump had the kids boo Obama. "My son didn't join the Scouts to be used as POTUS's political prop," one woman tweeted, and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy said that "as a Scout leader, my stomach is in knots about what Trump did.""The Boy Scouts of America is wholly non-partisan and does not promote any one position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy," the organization said in a statement. "The invitation for the sitting US President to visit the National Jamboree is a long-standing tradition and is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific policies."Update 7/25: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the Boy Scout Jamboree took place in Virginia, rather than West Virginia. We've corrected the error.He took this period of time off long—years—and then when he got back, he didn't have the same momentum. In life, I always tell this to people, you have to know whether or not you continue to have the momentum, and if you don't have it that's OK. Because you're going to go on and you're going to learn and you're going to do things that are great. But you have to know about the word "momentum."