President-elect Joe Biden coupled his clear Electoral College victory Monday with a firm rebuke of the defeated Donald Trump’s petulant resistance to the transfer of power. It was Biden’s first overt chastisement of the lame-duck president since the election.

Up until his address Monday, Biden had chosen to accentuate the positive in the national election’s outcome. He had graciously turned the other cheek to Trump’s ludicrous shenanigans. Now he declared: “In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed. Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact. And now it is time to turn the page, as we’ve done throughout our history. To unite. To heal.”

Biden thus crisply reminded the soon-to-depart Trump that seven million American voters had handed him his walking papers in the form of 306 electoral votes, 36 more than required. It was exactly the same number that had confirmed Trump’s own 2016 victory, which at the time he had called it a “landslide.”

The president-elect took note of the way in which Trump was given every opportunity to prove his claim that the election had been “rigged” against him, only to be resoundingly rejected at every judicial level in the states and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Election judges at every point, he said, “knew the election was overseen by them. It was honest, it was free, and it was fair. They saw it with their own eyes, and they wouldn’t be bullied into saying anything different.” He concluded with a full-throated defense of the open political system Trump was so blatantly attacking.

“If anyone didn’t know it before, we know it now,” he said. “What beats deep in the hearts of the American people is this: democracy. … Thankfully, a unanimous Supreme Court immediately and completely rejected this effort. The court sent a clear signal to President Trump that they would be no part of an unprecedented assault on our democracy.”

Ironically, that rebuff came at a time Trump had hoped that his appointment of a third justice to the highest court would deliver the third co-equal branch of the federal system to his will. It has turned out, in this instance at least, that the most powerful jurists in the land remembered and were true to their commitment to honor the letter of the law.

Biden then pivoted to the most urgent challenge he will face in assuming the presidency. “There is urgent work in front of all of us,” he said. “Getting this pandemic under control to getting the nation vaccinated against this virus. Delivering immediate economic help so badly needed by so many Americans who are hurting today, and then building our economy back better than it ever was.”

Fortuitously, this Biden pep talk came on the day the first COVID-19 vaccines were being shipped around the country and administered to the most essential public health workers — the most promising portent of a return to normal since the election of Joe Biden.

But there was little reason to hope or expect that Trump would finally desist from his totally unrealistic effort to reverse his scheduled departure from the Oval Office on January 20, let alone attend the Biden inauguration that has marked the traditional peaceful transfer of power in this country. It’s an unfortunate coda to the Trump era now passing from the American scene.

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Jules Witcover is a

nationally syndicated columnist.