Well, he did say go peacefully protest so they impeached him for "inciting" insurrection.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump was impeached by the U.S. House for a historic second time Wednesday, charged with “incitement of insurrection” over the deadly mob siege of the Capitol in a swift and stunning collapse of his final days in office.
apnews.com
He said peaceful
one time in an hour long speech that was otherwise telling them that they needed to fight like hell or they wouldn't have a country anymore, and in the context of him filing vexatious litigation about election fraud, repackaging the same false and irrelevant claims, performatively waving props that they declared were "binders of affidavits" (and just how much that was a prop is summed up by the fact that those affidavits were things like
reviews of the customer service at the nearby Checkers Restaurant) to create an illusion of strength that consistently fell apart in front of the judges who were quick to point out that the affidavits were a mix of irrelevant, speculative, hearsay (sometimes even hearsay
of hearsay), factually wrong, contradictory, and rooted in an erroneous understanding of even the basics of the tabulation procedures.
Time and again, the cases were dismissed for lack of merit, with the judges explaining in detail how Trump et al had presented nothing substantive and didn't even meet the threshold of probable cause, much less make their case, detailing how the positions put forth by Trump et al were - and I quote - "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence", and in many cases wholly predicated on misunderstanding and misrepresenting standard procedure as if they were proof of malfeasance entirely due to the claimant's own failures to acquaint themselves with the process, resulting in the "plaintiff's interpretation of events [being] incorrect and not credible". ...Only for Trump et al to jump onto conservative outlets and
lie to people like you that the courts had dismissed the case without so much as looking at the evidence - much less weighing its merits - and therefore were
clearly corrupt and could not be trusted to do the "right thing" of ruling in his favor.
To borrow from an old post:
If it had just been a case of a few words in his speech in isolation, we wouldn't be having this discussion. We're having this discussion because the speech
did not happen in isolation.
It happened in the context of Trump throwing everything he could at the wall to try to overturn the results of the election so he could remain in power, such as telling State Legislators to overturn the results (even after being told that they had no legal means to do so) and declaring them persona non-grata when they told him he was asking for something illegal and they wouldn't break the law for him, at which point he'd once again go to the air to lie to his base again, claiming that they
did have the power but refused to use it because they were RINOS who were letting the Democrats practically get away with murder. He heard
sixty times over from the courts that his cases didn't have merit and hadn't provided any evidence of his claims, and yet still turned around and lied to his base
again that the evidence was overwhelmingly in his favor but the judges were obviously corrupt and refused to hear it, further riling them up with the narrative that the election was clearly stolen and the official channels refused to do anything about it. It happened in the context of Trump et al arranging for fake electors to go to Congress to fraudulently say the vote was for Trump instead of Biden, disenfranchising those states for Trump's personal political benefit.
It happened in the context of Trump demanding that the Justice Department falsely announce that they'd found proof of pervasive election fraud so that he could use that announcement as a pretext to demand that States annul their official vote count and unilaterally declare Trump the 'actual' winner. It happened in the context of Team Trump demanding that Pence sow confusion on the floor of Congress and "creatively" count the votes to provide a smokescreen under which he could then illegally (as Pence himself had repeatedly made clear and the Eastman memo makes clear that Team Trump was well aware of) dismiss key states that voted for Biden out of hand, thereby ending the count while Trump had more votes, and use that to illegally declare Trump the winner and then have the government treat Trump's illicit 'confirmation' as a fait accompli. It happened in the context of Trump et al calling Congressional Representatives to demand that they sow whatever chaos they could to delay the certification to buy time for his team to pressure the States into the aforementioned overturning of their one certifications and election results. The Eastman memos in particular have been rebuked as - in no uncertain terms - an instruction manual for a coup d'etat, and you might notice that its proposals bear more than a passing resemblance to what Trump et al were attempting before, during, and after the storming of Capitol Hill.
That and more is the context in which Trump made his speech: A speech designed to incite its attendants into action, and telling them that they had the power to prevent Biden from taking office and that if they didn't use it they wouldn't have a country anymore. A speech during which the attendants were carrying weapons - which Trump allegedly dismissed as a non-concern on the stated grounds that they weren't there to hurt
him, to the point that he allegedly demanded the magnetometers used to find and confiscate weapons from the attendees be removed; the same attendees who were chanting "Take the Capitol", "Storm the Capitol", and "Invade the Capitol" and building gallows while declaring that Pence and other members of Congress deserved to be hung as traitors.
And the immediate aftermath of this speech was that its attendants violently assaulted the Capitol in his name, disrupted an official Congressional proceeding - in accordance with Trump's aforementioned goals - and caused Congress to be evacuated for its safety. In the immediate aftermath, these actions were described even by the likes of Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans as a failed insurrection, and was later described by the FBI as an act of domestic terrorism.
During the storming of the Capitol, Trump took advantage of the chaos to call various Representatives to tell them to make more objections to the counting of the electoral votes, to further stall the certification of the election with the ultimate goal of overturning it, with Giuliani doing much the same after the mob dispersed. To quote: "I know they're reconvening at 8 tonight, but it ... the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow – ideally until the end of tomorrow", still trying to use the attack to further their aim of breaking the law and violating the Constitution to keep Trump in power.
That's
the cliffnotes version of the context that leads to the description of this as an insurrection or failed coup, which is a lot stronger of a case than you pretend by insisting at looking at nothing but the speech and then claiming that Trump saying the word peaceful
once in his speech constitutes an ironclad defense to the idea that he engaged in insurrection through a months-long campaign to subvert the election results through extralegal methods that culminated in his followers assaulting the Capitol with the aim of illegally keeping him in power.
Then convicting him will be easy... oh wait. They didn't.
That'd be
United States of America v. Donald Trump (Docket 1:23-cr-00257-TSC), which indicted him last year, only for it to be immediately stalled by Trump et al's appeals of presidential immunity. The courts ruled against his claim and the trial was originally scheduled to start in March, but then in February the Supreme Court announced that it would hear arguments about presidential immunity in April (
Trump v. United States, Docket 23-939) and did not issue its ruling until July 1 (which infamously included new
extremely broad rules dictating what evidence is permissible, such as any conversation with the Vice President that can be spun as "discussing official duties"), with Supreme Court rules mandating a further moratorium on cases that might be affected by their ruling until August 1 to allow for appeals. Judge Chutkan only got the case back on August 2 - less than 2 weeks ago - and is currently waiting on a joint status report from the involved parties before resuming.
So no, it's not that "they didn't". It's that the case has been tied up in red tape that has prevented it from moving forward, explicitly because of the novel circumstances stemming from Trump being a former president.