OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Quality trails
benefit residents
and tourists alike
T
rails and footpaths are among our region’s best underap-
preciated assets, as explored in our story last week about
the Oregon Coast Trail. We ought to be doing more to
improve, use and publicize them.
This year, more walkers are discovering the Oregon Coast
Trail because of lingering snow pack and high water in the Sierra
Nevada mountains of Northern California, making the more-fa-
mous Pacific Crest Trail harder to use. The mountain trail has
gained visibility in recent years thanks to Cheryl Strayed’s mem-
oir “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” and
the subsequent Reese Witherspoon movie based on it.
It’s safe to say that most long-distance trails are not huge eco-
nomic boons for nearby communities — most hikers don’t drop
lots of money at art galleries or hotels. But they frequently do
buy supplies and sometimes replacement gear in the commu-
nities they pass through, while requiring little public outlay for
facilities and services.
The Oregon Coast Trail is in some ways more of a concept
than reality. It is officially designated but lacks the dedicated
infrastructure and camping sites provided on better-established
routes like the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Although
coastal hikers are respectful of their surroundings and tell of
warm hospitality along the way, they also have to worry about
finding legal campgrounds as the trail winds past Oregon’s many
coastal towns.
In addition to the urban trails of Astoria and Warrenton that
we’ve recently noted in this space, the website Atlas Obscura
celebrates Astoria’s many obscure footpaths, which it calls
Goonie Trails. (See www.atlasobscura.com/places/goonie-trails.)
Elsewhere in our region, Pacific County Economic Development
Director Jim Sayce recently undertook an epic bike ride on the
Willapa Hills Trail. Only partly developed, it follows an old
railroad right-of-way through spectacular but seriously rough
terrain.
There is something to be gained from residents and govern-
ment entities cooperating to improve the usability and awareness
of all these trails. In much of Europe, there is a well-established
tradition of manageable walks between lodging places and eat-
eries, allowing hikers to carry lighter loads. They enjoy the land-
scape, while communities earn money. It is possible to imagine
development of similar networks here.
Trails are inexpensive infrastructure that benefit residents and
tourists alike. We should realize what great assets they are and
begin acting accordingly.
A new era of productivity
possible at Port of Astoria
F
or the Port of Astoria, last week marked what might be the
beginning of a new era, one where “boring but productive”
becomes the norm over what has been a time of distraction
and inflammatory innuendo.
We hope that’s the case. It’s been a long time coming.
The five-member commission saw new members Frank
Spence and Dirk Rohne sworn in on July 3, along with returning
Commissioner James Campbell.
They join Commissioners
Robert Mushen and Bill
It’s time
Hunsinger. In the May election,
for the
Campbell soundly defeated fel-
new era of
low Commissioner Stephen
Fulton, who chose to run against
stability and
Campbell rather than to try and
productivity
retain his own seat. Rohne and
Spence easily out-tallied candi-
to begin.
dates who had platforms sim-
ilar to Fulton’s. Fulton and
Hunsinger were highly critical of Port Executive Director Jim
Knight and were often on the losing ends of contentious 3-2 votes.
The new commissioners each pledged in their campaigning
to move the Port ahead, away from past distractions, with Rohne
coining the “boring but productive” description of how he’d like
to see the commission operate.
The commission’s first act of business was to appoint new offi-
cers, with Spence, a retired former city and county administrator,
becoming president, and Rohne, a Brownsmead dairy farmer and
former elected county and community college representative, tak-
ing the vice president appointment.
Now that the new commission and leadership are in place, it’s
time to get down to business without the past problems. Issues of
economic development, Tongue Point’s future, the airport and Port
infrastructure each await action.
It’s time for the new era of stability and productivity to begin.
A conspiracy of dunces
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
People gather outside the White House on Tuesday to protest President Donald Trump.
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
H
ere is a good rule of thumb
for dealing with Donald
Trump: Everyone who gives
him the benefit of
the doubt eventu-
ally regrets it.
This was true of
clients and contrac-
tors and creditors
throughout his
business career.
It was true of the sycophants and
opportunists before whom he dan-
gled Cabinet appointments during
the campaign and then, oh, never
mind. It has been true of his Cabinet
members and spokesmen, whose
attempts to defend and explain their
boss’ conduct are gleefully undercut
by the boss himself. And it should
be true — for the sake of their souls,
I sincerely hope it’s true — of the
Republican leaders whose reputa-
tions for probity and principle he has
stomped all over since winning their
party’s nomination.
And now it’s true of me.
The benefit of the doubt I
extended to Trump was limited,
but on a rather important subject:
I thought that direct collusion
between his inner circle and Russian
officialdom during the 2016 cam-
paign was relatively unlikely and
the odds of ever finding proof of
such a conspiracy vanishingly low.
A lot of weirdness around Trump
and Russia, I argued, had a more
normal explanation — he had made
business deals with Russians, he
still harbors a 1980s-era vision of
superpower cooperation, and as a
foreign-policy neophyte he clutched
the idea of détente like a security
blanket even as the Russians sepa-
rately made moves to help him win.
My argument is no longer
operative, because we know now
that Donald Trump’s son, his son-
in-law and his campaign manager
all took a meeting in which it was
explicitly promised that damaging
information on Hillary Clinton
would be supplied as “part of Russia
and its government’s support for Mr.
Trump.”
The meeting’s existence does not
carry us all the way to the maximal
collusion scenario, in which Trump
himself was aware of Russia’s
role in the hack of the Democratic
National Committee and ordered his
aides to conspire with WikiLeaks
and Russian intelligence to time the
drip-drip-drip of hacked emails and
maximize their impact.
As the hapless Don Jr. — the
Gob Bluth or Fredo Corleone of
a family conspicuously short on
Michaels — protested in his own
defense, the Russian rendezvous we
know about came before (though
only slightly before) the WikiLeaks
haul was announced. So the Trump
team presumably assumed that
it involved some other Hillary-
related dirt — some of the missing
Clinton server emails that Trump
himself jokingly (“jokingly”?) urged
Russian hackers to conjure and
release, or direct evidence of Clinton
Foundation corruption in its Russian
relationships.
With that semi-exculpatory
explanation in hand, you can grope
your way to the current anti-anti-
Trump talking point — that Don Jr.
and company were just hoping to
“gather oppo” to which a foreign
government might happen to be
privy, much as Democratic opera-
tives looked to Ukraine for evidence
of the Trump campaign’s shady ties.
Everyone who
gives him
the benefit
of the doubt
eventually
regrets it.
But even if accepting oppo from
a foreign government is technically
legal — it probably is, but I leave
that question to campaign finance
lawyers to work out — this talking
point takes you only so far. I am
not a particularly fierce Russia
hawk, but the Russians are still a
more-hostile-than-not power these
days, with stronger incentives to
subvert American democracy than
the average foreign government. So
taking their oppo has a gravity that
should have stopped a more upright
and patriotic campaign short.
Second, if the Russians had been
dangling some of Hillary’s missing
30,000 emails, those, too, would had
to have been hacked — that is, sto-
len — to end up in Moscow’s hands.
So Don Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared
Kushner should have known going
in that if the offer was genuine, the
oppo useful, it might involve stolen
goods.
But on the basis of the emails,
the younger Trump went in not
skeptically but eagerly (“if it’s what
you say I love it”), ignoring or sim-
ply accepting the weird formulation
about Russian support for Trump’s
campaign. And then of course every-
body lied about or “forgot” about the
meeting, repeatedly and consistently,
right up until the emails themselves
made their way to the press.
So while this is not direct
evidence that the president of the
United States was complicit in a
virtual burglary perpetrated against
the other party during an election
season, it’s strong evidence that
we should drop the presumption
that such collusion is an extreme or
implausible scenario.
Instead, the mix of inexperience,
incaution and conspiratorial glee on
display in the emails suggests that
people in Trump’s immediate fam-
ily — not just satellites like Roger
Stone — would have been delighted
to collude if the opportunity pre-
sented itself. Indeed, if the Russians
didn’t approach the Trump circle
about how to handle the DNC email
trove, it was probably because they
recognized that anyone this naive,
giddy and “Burn After Reading”-
level stupid would make a rather
poor espionage partner.
Then keep in mind, too, that all
of this has come out (relatively)
easily, thanks to digging by this
newspaper’s reporters and leaks
from the various factions in and
around the White House, without
the subpoenas and immunity deals
that the formal investigations have
at their disposal. That means there is
probably more and worse to come,
and the more there is, the worse
the president’s dealings with James
Comey look. Even if the president
himself is innocent of Russian col-
lusion, protecting your family from
exposure is a pretty strong motive
for obstruction.
In the end, impeachment is
political, not legal, and House
Republicans probably won’t
impeach for anything short of a
transcript of a call between Trump
and Putin in which the words “yes,
I want you to hack their servers big-
league, Vladimir” appear in black-
and-white. And even then …
But right now, the 2018 congres-
sional elections promise to be a de
facto referendum on impeachment.
There are enough sparks in the
smoke; there will probably be fire
for some of Trump’s intimates
before another year is out.
And as for the president himself
— well, to conclude where I began,
anyone presuming his innocence at
this point should have all the con-
fidence of Chris Christie awaiting
his Cabinet appointment, or Sean
Spicer reading over the day’s talking
points. Keep an eye on that Trump-
monogrammed rug under your feet;
it may not be there for long.