4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM
Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Dwight Caswell
Surfers and fishers at
Short Sand Beach
OUR
COAST
BRINGS EXCITEMENT
TO OUR VISITORS
W
ednesday is a special day
for this newspaper.
Our Coast magazine
makes its annual appearance. In a
word that has gone out of fashion in
the digital age, this is a publishing
event.
We invented Our Coast in 2012.
Seven editions later, the magazine
continues to be fresh and young.
Look for inventive articles, by mul-
tiple authors, about attractions on
U.S. Highway 101, the history of the
Garden of Surging Waves and the
resurgence of vinyl record shops.
And look especially for a set of
Noel Thomas drawings. We have
often published Thomas’ work in
The Daily Astorian; they will appear
especially vibrant on the magazine’s
high-quality paper stock.
Boredom gave birth to Our Coast.
After decades of producing a tradi-
tional visitors guide, the newspaper’s
Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
Drew Smith prepares to launch his kayak near the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge.
James Kosharek
Nehalem Music & Game
editors and advertising manager were
looking for two things. Instead of
having the same staff writers produce
articles about the same topics every
year, they chose the kind of vari-
ety any high-quality magazine would
strive for.
Secondly, the editors envisioned a
magazine that would cover the larger
zone that beckons visitors — from
Oysterville in Washington state to
Manzanita in Oregon.
In a nutshell, our team in 2012
sought to entertain our readers with
visual and textual variety. Over the
years, we beckoned a Seattle writer
named Knute Berger to write about
the Fisher Poets, something he had
never attended. And we invited our
editorial colleague Tim Trainor from
Pendleton to fish the north fork of the
Nehalem River.
Stunning imagery of landscapes
and landmarks on Our Coast cre-
ate a unique visual backdrop for each
issue.
This will be Features Editor Erick
Bengel’s first issue of Our Coast.
Bengel was preceded by Rebecca
Sedlak, who brought a heavy dose
of magazine journalism training to
the product. Kathleen Strecker took
on the heroic task of establishing the
magazine and dramatically moving
up the learning curve with the sec-
ond issue.
Over the years, readers in our mar-
ket and far beyond have expressed
their pleasure at seeing Our Coast.
We look forward to hearing from
you.
Trump, flush with power
W
ASHINGTON — This was the
week Donald Trump became
president.
Or at least the week he became the pres-
ident we were always expecting. He ceased
bothering to pretend that he was ever going
to do the job in any normal sense of the
word. He decided to totally own the whole,
entire joke that he is.
He started hiring people right off TV. He
extended his tiny fingers into his giant flat
screen, “Purple Rose of
Cairo”-style, and dragged
cable conservatives directly
into the administration.
We’ve always known
Trump makes stuff up. But
now he has stopped both-
MAUREEN ering to pretend he doesn’t.
DOWD
Truthful hyperbole is out.
Outlandish fabrication is in.
Trump began bragging to Republicans at a
private fundraiser in St. Louis on Wednesday:
Oh, get a load of this trade stuff I made up
to outfox that fox, Justin Trudeau. I felt bad
doing it to such a nice, good-looking guy. But
it’s hilarious!
He is no longer bothering to pretend that
governing involves a learning curve. Now he
finds it’s clever to be a fabulist, concocting
phony facts about the trade deficit when
talking to the Canadian prime minister —
one of our closest allies — or inventing a
story for donors about how Japanese officials
test U.S. cars by dropping a bowling ball on
their hoods from 20 feet up to see which ones
dent.
The president thinks he’s navigating to his
true north while the rest of the world thinks
he’s headed due south.
Trump & Friends presented this dizzying
White House purge as a twisted version of
him growing into the job, even as everyone
else felt he was going in the opposite direc-
tion, behaving disgracefully by 86-ing Rex
Tillerson in a tweet and tormenting other
staffers he finds annoying or uppity. The
Daily Beast reported that Tillerson learned
his fate from John Kelly while on the toilet,
which is apropos because Bill Maher likes to
say Trump does his morning business while
doing his morning business. (H.R. McMaster
is probably afraid to hit the bathroom now.)
Trump got his next moment of gross
exaltation when Jeff Sessions, frantically
trying to save his own job, fired Andrew
McCabe hours before he would have become
eligible for his government pension and on
his birthday weekend. John Brennan, the for-
mer director of the CIA, tweeted that Trump
will take his “rightful place as a disgraced
demagogue in the dustbin of history.” Then
the president’s lawyer, John Dowd, issued a
statement Saturday saying he will “pray” that
Rod Rosenstein “will follow the brilliant and
courageous example” of Sessions and end the
Russia investigation entirely.
Trump is giddy about all the CHAOS
— he capitalized it on Twitter — feeling
that he’s ridding himself of any idiots who
called him a moron or dumb as a rock and
any economists who don’t understand what a
great dealmaker he is.
Except the one thing his presidency has
definitively proved is that he doesn’t have the
foggiest idea how to prepare for a negotia-
tion, let alone negotiate.
As if Omarosa filling a top White House
job between reality shows was not weird
enough, The Times’ Michael Grynbaum
described a “hall-of-mirrors moment” on
Wednesday: Larry Kudlow, a chatterer
plucked from CNBC to replace Gary Cohn as
Trump’s chief economic adviser, went on TV
to describe the president telling Kudlow how
“very handsome” he looks on TV.
“So Trumpian!” Kudlow laughed.
It’s the final Foxification of politics.
Trump spends all his time watching Fox
News, basing his opinions and tweets on it,
and now he’s simply becoming one with it.
He is even willing to overlook his distaste for
the yeti mustache of the warmongering John
Bolton and consider the Fox News analyst as
a replacement for McMaster.
Roger Ailes would be so proud, if he were
still alive and harassing women.
Trump thinks he’s a fabulously devious
manager creating “great energy,” with great
ratings coming from his talent for theatrical
twists and turns. But he’s really inhumane,
playing people against one another and
widely discussing successors for officials
who haven’t even been officially informed
that they’re walking the plank. And, far from
the A-team he promised, he’s hired a bunch
of pathetic, disgusting swamp schnorrers
who can’t stop using taxpayer money to fund
their office furniture or office redesign or
luxury plane trips with their wives.
“I like conflict,” Trump said this month at
a news conference with the Swedish prime
minister, smacking his fists together and add-
ing, “I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I
think it’s the best way to go.”
Never mind that a lot of the country —
and the world — craves stability.
While the president may appear uncon-
strained, intoxicated with escaping the net of
those who displease him by telling him “No,”
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
President Donald Trump talks with re-
porters during a meeting with Irish Prime
Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office
of the White House.
he is getting ever more enmeshed in another
net — Robert Mueller’s.
“I think Trump is royally pissed about the
Mueller subpoena of the Trump Organization
records,” Trump biographer Michael
D’Antonio says about the special counsel
crossing the president’s red line. “He fears
the nakedness of his true business activities
being revealed far more than the shame of
‘Access Hollywood’ or Stormy Daniels.
Unlike the show of blank paper in file folders
conducted when he supposedly stepped
away from his businesses, this will require
real documents, and I doubt he can count on
people lying for him.”
If you’ve ever had a narcissistic boss, you
know that they hate to hear any criticism
and love to whack the naysayers and replace
them with more compliant types. The circle
of sycophants, who do not care about the
boss, often spurs the leader’s flameout.
President Trump is doing it his way now.
But soon, he’ll be doing it Mueller’s way.
Maureen Dowd writes for the New York
Times News Service.