New White House communications czar Anthony Scaramucci wasn't joking when he said he wanted Donald Trump to "be himself."
The President offered a fresh exhibition of his unorthodox, unchained approach to politics on Monday night at the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia.
To be fair, he did pay lip service to the idea that some occasions should be immune from politics.
"We put aside all of the policy fights in Washington DC you have been hearing about with all the fake news and all of that. We are going to put that aside," Trump told a rowdy throng he called "young patriots," who periodically broke into cheers of "USA, USA."
"Who the hell wants to talk about politics when I am in front of the Boy Scouts?" Trump asked the crowd of around 40,000.
But then, Trump proceeded to turn one of the more worthy and non-partisan presidential duties into a stark political rally.
The President raged against the Washington "cesspool," boasted about the big Midwest swing state wins that got him to the White House, slammed the "fake news" media and mocked Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
He even joked about firing Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price if he didn't round up the votes to repeal and replace Obamacare this week. At least it looked like he was joking.
It was the latest occasion in which the President has used what have traditionally been seen as non-partisan, ceremonial aspects of the commander-in-chief's role to lash his enemies in an explicit and deeply political way.
In a commencement speech at the US Coast Guard Academy in June, the President complained that "no politician in history" had been treated worse or more unfairly than him.
Shortly after being inaugurated, he gave a strikingly political speech at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, that offended some sectors of the agency's workforce.
Trump did offer some uplifting stories Monday — including a moving discourse on the need to keep up momentum in life and in business — and implored the young scouts never to give up working and advised them to find a career they loved.
But he seeded the inspirational content of his speech with sharp jabs that contrasted with the more neutral tone of the remarks by the last two presidents to address the scout jamboree in person, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Trump played off the scout loyalty pledge to criticize those in Washington who he feels are showing insufficient allegiance to him.
"We could really use some more loyalty, I will tell you that," Trump said, without saying to whom he was referring.
In recent days, the President has accused Republicans of showing him insufficient loyalty over their failure to move quickly to pass a health care bill.
On Monday, he tweeted about his "beleaguered" Attorney General Jeff Sessions, after saying last week he would never have nominated the former Alabama senator had he known he would recuse himself from oversight of the Russia investigation.
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