President Donald Trump was onstage at the quadrennial National Boy Scout Jamboree on Monday, in Glen Jean, West Virginia, when he turned to Tom Price, his Secretary of Health and Human Services and a former Scout, who was standing behind him, with a question. “You going to get the votes?” he asked. The votes in question, he’d explained to the Scouts in attendance, were for “killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare that’s really hurting us, folks,” in favor of a Republican bill that would deprive an estimated twenty-two million Americans of their health-care coverage. He didn’t ask the Scouts if any of their families might be among that number; instead, he asked them to join him in mocking his subordinate.
“He’d better get them,” Trump said. “He’d better get them. Ooh, he’d better—otherwise, I’ll say, ‘Tom, you’re fired!’ ” He delivered this line with his signature finger-pointing gesture, and basked in hoots from the crowd. Another President might have evoked the kinds of stories that the Scouts share over campfires, or on the trail. Trump started with the assumption that they had spent quality time huddled in front of a television set, watching him on “The Apprentice.” What is a merit badge, after all, next to winning a challenge to come up with a campaign for a Trump-branded product?
The televised image of him punishing an underling seemed to bring Trump particular pleasure, because it had to do with the one Boy Scout value that the President highlighted, rather than ignored, albeit in a distorted form: loyalty. The broadest point of criticism about Trump’s appearance at the event has been that he politicized the moment, but that was not, or not exactly, the main problem. The Boy Scouts do have a political meaning; otherwise, the various fights over the years to expand the franchise, as it were, by lifting a ban on gay Scouts, in 2014, and, a year later, on gay Scout leaders, would not have been so fraught. It was in the name of speaking politically about that ban that President Barack Obama skipped the jamboree, though he sent a recorded message. (Trump elided that reason when he asked the Scouts, sarcastically, whether Obama had shown up.) Other Presidents have spoken at the jamboree about democratic values, at times in the form of warnings about tyranny abroad, or about specific issues, such as drug addiction. (The Washington Post has a good catalogue.) They were, though, more subtle than Trump, who, after joking about firing Price, added, “He’d better get Senator Capito to vote for it!”—a reference to Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, who so far has been hesitant to jettison the interests of her constituents to vote for her party’s miserable health-care bill. What was different about Trump was not that he spoke politically but that he did so in a way that was demagogic, non-inclusive, dishonest, and, at times, simply crude.
One parable that Trump presented to the boys—it was, again, more of a reality-television recap than a campfire tale—included several of those elements. It involved a man in the tri-state area, a builder of homes, perhaps much like the President, who, three quarters of a century ago, “became an unbelievable success, and got more and more successful.” The man was named William Levitt—“Anyone ever hear of Levittown?”—and Trump made him sound like the miller’s daughter from “Rumpelstiltskin”: “At night he’d go to these major sites with teams of people and he’d scour the sites for nails and sawdust and small pieces of wood. And they’d clean the site so when the workers came in the next morning, the sites would be spotless and clean, and he did it properly. And he did this for twenty years, and then he was offered a lot of money for his company.” Like magic! And, of course, with the help of the G.I. Bill’s mortgage assistance, and while refusing to sell to black home buyers until he was forced to after a long series of lawsuits—but Trump, whose own family of builders had to settle discrimination suits, skipped that. What mattered was that Levitt “sold his company for a tremendous amount of money. And he went out and bought a big yacht. And he had a very interestinglife.”
It was at this point that the President of the United States began to leer in front of forty thousand Boy Scouts. He hadn’t forgotten whom he was talking to; their adolescent male status, and all that he imagined that to mean, was, rather, the point: “You’re Boy Scouts, so I’m not going to tell you what he did.” He spoke like a man who wanted to be asked to post some lewd pictures: “Should I tell you? Should I tell you? Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life.”
He never did say what happened on the yacht, which, according to Levitt’s Times obituary, was named La Belle Simone, for his third wife. When Levitt sold his business to I.T.T., he got sixty-two million dollars of that company’s stock. He borrowed recklessly against it, got involved in shaky foreign ventures with dubious partners, and lost it all. (“There were terrible articles, and he would say, ‘Ah, Simone, it’s yellow journalism. You can’t believe what you read. Do you trust me?’ ” Simone Levitt told New York magazine, in 2013.) Trump acknowledged the fall, but offered the Boy Scouts a different explanation, one that was revealed when he, Trump, approached the sage at a cocktail party thrown by Steve Ross, whom he seemed to assume was a stock figure for the Boy Scouts. (“One of the great people—he came up and discovered, really founded, Time Warner.”) It was one of the “hottest” parties, and people were ignoring “the once great William Levitt of Levittown.” Whether this was because, as Trump posited, there were so many other celebrities around, or because it was around the time that Levitt was charged with wrongly taking five million dollars from a charitable foundation, is anybody’s guess. Trump, who, as the Washington Post pointed out, once had his own foundation pay Donald Trump, Jr.,’s seven-dollar Boy Scout registration fee, may not have cared. What Trump of Trump Tower wanted to know was how Levitt had fallen so far.
“And he said, ‘Donald, I lost my momentum. I lost my momentum,’ ” Trump said. It was, the President told the Scouts, too true. For anyone taking a glance at Levitt’s career, it was also baffling. Momentum toward what, with what values to guide him? Success, a word that Trump uses frequently, was the theme of his speech, and yet he could hardly have imagined that concept—and how it applied to the boys who were listening to him and their place in the world—in a more bereft way: kill Obamacare; mind your yacht; fire people who don’t deliver, because “we could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.” He announced, “The Scouts believe in putting America First!”; The “fake news” media was going to lie about their number; under the Trump Administration, “you’ll be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again when you go shopping. Believe me. ‘Merry Christmas!’ ”
After telling the tale of William Levitt, and offering a brief rumination about not taking too much time off, and the foolishness of most business advice other than his own (“Some of these guys that never made ten cents, they’re on television giving you things about how you’re going to be successful, and the only thing they ever did was a book and a tape”), Trump moved on to asking the boys if they remembered the great night when he won the election. He pictured them, again, watching television. “That map was so red, it was unbelievable! “ he said. That was back when he had momentum.