Opinion

President Donald Trump's dragged at least three other officials into his Ukraine scandal, and if it takes them down, it could result in Speaker Nancy Pelosi being the new president of the United States.

Well, it finally happened. After months of handwringing, the Democrats finally took the step their most committed activists have been clamoring for since November of 2018. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that Congress will launch an official impeachment investigation. As of this writing, 203 Democrats are now on the record in support of an inquiry. On Monday morning, that number stood at  134.

Donald Trump’s much-ballyhooed bromance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu is on the rocks because Netanyahu’s Likud party failed for a second time this year to win enough votes to secure his political future, throwing Israeli politics into indefinite disarray.

Yesterday, I said I could no longer defend the House Speaker’s current position with respect to impeachment. It had been prudent for her to remain officially ambivalent, I wrote, while some in her caucus investigated Donald Trump’s high crimes and while other more moderate members kept their distance. But after it was revealed Friday that the president tried to sabotage our sovereignty by asking a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a political rival, I felt Nancy Pelosi’s fence-sitting was no longer tolerable.

For a second year in a row, Fox News host Laura Ingraham has found herself embroiled in controversy after attacking a teenager on live TV — this time a 16-year-old climate activist with autism.

During normal times, Donald Trump’s attempted extortion of the Ukrainian government, aimed at forcing an investigation against one of his chief political opponents would almost immediately become the purview of the attorney general, who would — again, during normal times — appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the allegations. After all, the president attempted to use taxpayer money and the weight of the federal government to force Ukraine’s newly elected president to help Trump’s re-election campaign: This was a flagrant abuse of power, a flagrant attempt at bribery and extortion, and absolutely an indictment- or impeachment-worthy trespass.

In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir argued that women were at a disadvantage in a society where they grew up under ‘a multiplicity of incompatible myths’ about women. Instead of being encouraged to dream their own dreams and pursue meaningful projects for their lives, Beauvoir argued that the ‘myths’ proposed to women, whether in literature or history, science or psychoanalysis, encouraged them to believe that to be a woman was to be for others – and especially for men. Throughout childhood, girls were fed a steady diet of stories that led them to believe that to succeed as a woman was to succeed at love – and that to succeed at other things would make them less lovable.

After spending his early life suffering under the Nazis and then Stalin, the Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski devoted his career to studying the relationship between psychological disorders and politics. He wanted to understand why psychopaths and narcissists are so strongly attracted to power as well as the processes by which they take over governments and countries.

During all the months when the world waited with bated breath for the results of the Mueller report, the most pressing question was always whether the special prosecutor would find that President Trump and his campaign had colluded with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election. Trump had branded the investigation a "witch hunt" and repeated the words "No collusion! No obstruction!" on a loop. But legal observers made clear that there was no legal concept called "collusion." and instead Mueller would be looking at whether or not the Trump campaign had engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

Abuse of power must be the label on a burgeoning dossier of complaints about Donald Trump as a president who would order subordinates to ignore congressional subpoenas, to steal money from one approved budget pot to build his Wall, to flaunt ethical protocols – and to do all those obstruction-like things outlined in the Mueller Report.

President Donald Trump is defending his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, one that recent media reports suggest may have been made in order to dig up dirt about one of Trump's likeliest and strongest opponents in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

"Rambo: Last Blood," the latest in the long-running franchise about a traumatized war veteran (Sylvester Stallone) turned on-demand badass, is less an escapist action movie and more a dramatized manifestation of the most notorious sentences from Donald Trump's presidential campaign announcement speech: "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Even for a series that has always been shaped by a right wing worldview, the only reason for this latest sequel to exist — besides generating profits from die-hard Stallone fans — is to validate MAGA-world bigotries about Mexicans.This article first appeared in Salon.