President Donald Trump waves after speaking to Boy Scouts during the National Boy Scout Jamboree at Summit Bechtel National Scout Reserve in Glen Jean, West Virginia on July 24. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Boy Scouts chief apologizes after Trump speech

The head of the Boy Scouts of America apologized to the group’s members on Thursday after President Donald Trump delivered a meandering, controversial and frequently political speech to the organization's National Jamboree on Monday .

“I want to extend my sincere apologies to those in our Scouting family who were offended by the political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree,” Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh said in a letter published online. “That was never our intent.”


Surbaugh noted in the letter that the group is nonpartisan and has had a “long-standing tradition” of inviting the sitting president to speak at the event since its inception in 1937. He reiterated that Trump’s appearance at the gathering was “no way an endorsement of any person, party or policies.”

But Surbaugh acknowledged that the president’s remarks had “overshadowed” the rest of the conference and said the organization’s leadership “sincerely regret[s] that politics were inserted into the Scouting program.”

“While we live in a challenging time in a country divided along political lines, the focus of Scouting remains the same today as every day,” he wrote.

The group had already tried to distance itself from Trump's remarks on Monday, which were widely panned as inappropriate. “The Boy Scouts of America is wholly non-partisan and does not promote any one position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy,” the group said in a statement Monday night.

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Over the course of the speech, Trump threatened to fire his Health and Human Services secretary, repeatedly bragged about his win in the election last year and the size of the crowd, and went on a tangent about a wealthy man who “got bored with his life of yachts and sailing,” “lost all of his money,” and later ran into Trump at a cocktail party with “the hottest people in New York.”

View Does President Trump owe the Boy Scouts an apology? Sarah Huckabee Sanders is asked whether the White House and specifically President Trump owes a personal apology to the Boy Scouts of America for politicizing their annual Jamboree, after the Boy Scouts issued an apology to its member's families.

“It was very sad,” Trump told the kids.

Trump also suggested that the children in the crowd had voted for him in the election when most of them would not have been eligible.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday she had not seen the Boy Scouts' statement but dismissed the criticism of Trump's speech.

"I was at that event and I saw nothing but roughly 40- to 45,000 Boy Scouts cheering the president on throughout his remarks," Sanders told reporters at the daily press briefing. "And I think they were pretty excited that he was there and happy to hear him speak to them."

