Yvonne Abraham is a brilliant columnist for the Boston Globe. She watched the impeachment hearings and found it ironic that the party defending the most divisive president in memory defends his seditious actions and language by appeals to “unity.”

She writes:

Unity. Seriously?

One after the other, the president’s defenders rose to the podium in the House chamber on Wednesday, trying to head off an inevitable vote for impeachment with one of the most transparently cynical gambits in recent memory.

We can’t impeach a president who incited a violent insurrection in which five people died, they argued, because it would further divide us, and what the nation needs now is to heal, to move on, to come together. Not by holding the inciter-in-chief accountable for sending a deadly mob to the Capitol and forcing some of these very legislators to flee for their lives, but by yet again letting him escape any consequences for his heinous actions.

The very leaders who refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, who themselves trucked in the falsehoods and debunked conspiracy theories about a stolen vote and oncoming tyranny — the lies that fueled the Capitol assault — were now preaching the gospel of unity. And they did it with straight faces.

For example, Madison Cawthorn, the newly elected congressman from North Carolina, urged Democrats to “vote against this divisive impeachment and realize that dividing America will not save this republic.”

That is pretty rich, given that MAGA diehard Cawthorn was all-in on the effort to overturn the results of the presidential election, even helping to whip up the mob at the rally before the insurrection. His first tweet after winning his House seat was “Cry more, lib.”

Here’s the thing about unity: To achieve it, you have to believe in a common good. And most members of this Republican Party have demonstrated over and over that they simply don’t.

She goes on to describe the loathsome behavior of the Republicans who were in hiding with Democrats. Some refused to wear face masks.

“It wasn’t all Republicans, just the organizers of the revolt,” said Representative Seth Moulton, who was one of the last to arrive in the room where hundreds took refuge. “They were clearly proud not to be wearing masks.”

Unity? Seriously? Don’t ask for if you don’t believe in it yourself.

I am still incredulous that so many Republicans defended a president who put their lives in danger and did nothing to protect them, no matter how many calls he received from top Republicans begging for protection from the mob he incited.