Donald Trump Brags About ‘Record-Setting’ Crowd Size At Scout Jamboree; Another Trump Lie [Opinion]

Donald Trump claimed that the crowd size at his appearance at the Boy Scout Jamboree this week was “record-setting,” and the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is publicly calling him out on this lie, Buzzfeed is reporting.

Trump’s appearance Monday at the annual National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia is going down as one of the defining moments in Trump’s presidency for all the wrong reasons. As BBC News reported, his speech at the event, during which he lectured the children about politics and even encouraged them to boo Obama (who was himself a Boy Scout), has been met with heated derision from parents. Some have even threatened to pull their kids out of Scouting because of it.

“Done with scouts after you felt the need to have my kid listen to a liar stroke his ego.”

Now, Trump is drawing even more flack for the appearance over his inaccurate bragging about the crowd size.

In fact, he opened his speech by bragging about the size of the crowd. He even tried to warn the crowd in advance that the “fake news” would spin the crowd size to make it look like it was small.

“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.”

#BoyScoutSpeech
As a former Eagle Scout I applaud President Trump’s speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree…and so did the Boy Scouts. HUGE Crowd pic.twitter.com/vnHgB3wtkl

— Gary Nabhan (@GPN14) July 25, 2017

Actually, Mr. President, most reports have put the size of the crowd at about 40-45,000. That estimate comes from none other than the Boy Scouts of America organization itself. If you want to call that “Fake News,” be my guest.

But Trump’s claim that the crowd size is “record-setting” is patently false. This, too, comes from none other than the BSA. In a statement to Buzzfeed, the organization contradicted Trump’s claim that the attendance was “record-setting.”

“This is not our largest jamboree on record. To the best of our knowledge, it was in 1960, when more than 56,000 Scouts and volunteers gathered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for the BSA’s fifth National Jamboree.”

Of course, that Trump likes to brag about crowd size, even when the numbers don’t back him up, is old news. This brand of Trump falsehoods began literally the day of his inauguration when he claimed [falsely] that the crowd for his inauguration was the biggest ever. It was not.

As Time reported at the time, Trump was so incensed at the National Park Service for tweeting out a photo comparing the size of Trump’s inauguration vs. Obama’s inauguration that he instructed his staffers to find the employee who tweeted it.

The Boy Scout Motto says that a Scout will be, among other things, “trustworthy,” and the Scout Oath says that a Scout will be “morally straight.”

That’s good advice that the President of the United States would do well to consider next time he brags about the size of a crowd at one of his events.

[Featured Image by Steve Helber/AP]