After all 7 GOP U.S. Reps from Indiana voted against impeachment of the current occupant of the Oval Office, a common theme developed. As Rep Jim Banks said: “The Democrat party is dividing America when we should be doing everything we can to unite the country.”

Of several definitions for the verb “unite,” none seems appropriate in this context. A genuine desire to “unite” does not start with an insult. The Democratic Party has two letters more than Rep Banks’s range. The shortened form is used as a dig by some in the GOP.

Definitions of “unite” include “to cause to be in a state of mutual sympathy, or to have a common opinion or attitude.” Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed., 2001, p. 2074. Banks’s “fearless leader” a/k/a Person # 1 spoke at the January 6 “Save America” rally.

There are few speeches, per line, that have carried as many slams and insults as the January 6 speech. trump blasted “fake media,” ridiculed Georgia’s governor as the “dumbest,” accused R’s and D’s of election misconduct that made trump the victim.

To be polite, trump was delusional to say we “have hundreds of thousands of people here.” Data journalism Prof Steven Doig of Arizona State: “I’m perfectly prepared to believe there were several thousand people there, even 10,000 maybe. But when you start pushing that up to 100,000 and so on, that’s not going to be true.”

trump stoked the crowd to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol...” Why? “But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Whether trump had intelligence before his speech that plans for violence were afoot is irrelevant for two reasons. 1) Social media were rife with plans for violence that corroborated police information and 2) Seriously - trump and intelligence in the same sentence?

Calls for the country to “unite” after four years of chaos capped by almost 400 thousand deaths caused by the ineptitude of a man who seeks to split apart this country to try and hold onto office is, mildly stated, crap.
However, we all should be united to enforce the law. As trump also said on January 6: “They’ll knock out Lincoln too ... But then we signed a little law. You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for 10 years...”

Conspiracy to commit a crime also is a no-no. 18 U.S.C. sec. 371. Monuments were damaged at The Capitol. That little law of which trump should be enforced. And elected officials should not try to preach unity after vandals carrying Confederate flags threatened our halls of government.