On Monday, January 6, 2025, Congress will meet to certify the results of the 2024 presidential election, the final formality in sealing Donald Trump’s victory and the last hurdle before Inauguration on January 20, which is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s last political act will be to preside over Trump’s certification, her powers limited to a ceremonial role by a reform that was passed in 2022 to “protect democracy.”

Oh, the irony. Had Harris won the election, January 6 would have been observed as a solemn anniversary of the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” as President Joe Biden once erroneously called it.

Democrats would have used the certification of the Electoral College vote to cast 2024 as the ultimate repudiation of Trump, and as a confirmation that Democrats had, in fact, saved democracy from a would-be fascist dictator, a new Adolf Hitler.

Instead, Democrats must now model the “peaceful transition of power” that they once insisted had been threatened by Trump’s 2021 rally against what many Americans believed was a stolen election. Democrats will be forced Monday to repudiate, in deed if not in word, their claim that Trump was too dangerous to be allowed near the Oval Office ever again.

There will be angry speeches, and probably a few tears, but in the end they will certify him as president-elect.

There will be a few exceptions. Some Democrats will, no doubt, object to the certification, as they have done after every presidential election that Republicans have won since 2000. The chairman and several members of the January 6 Committee themselves had tried to stop Republican presidents from taking office by objecting to the certification of the vote — efforts that media fact-checkers dismissed as “relatively common,” at least when Democrats tried to do it.

There may be some who try a more ambitious idea, first floated in February 2024 by January 6 Committee member and former House impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), of having Congress declare Trump ineligible to hold public office based on a misreading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, barring insurrectionists.

Some Democrats have publicly advocated for this strategy in recent weeks. Who knows? We may even see a vote on it.

But these efforts will fail, as would any effort to interrupt the proceedings with some kind of march or riot.

Unlike then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who admitted privately that she had not done enough to secure the Capitol on that fateful day in 2021, Republicans will make sure the Capitol is protected. (Notably, Pelosi was never called to testify by the January 6 Committee, nor was her daughter’s footage of the day subpoenaed as crucial evidence.)

The simple truth about January 6, 2021, is that it was a disaster brought about by the mistrust between the parties — one emphasized a year before, when Pelosi tore up Trump’s State of the Union address in front of the whole nation. Trump’s strategy of forcing the Electoral College vote back to the states was reckless, even if it was grounded in legal and constitutional arguments; his effort to pressure the straitlaced Vice President Mike Pence was doomed to fail.

Yet it was not an “insurrection”; the plurality of participants believed they were saving democracy, not overturning it.

Ultimately, Democrats destroyed their own moral case by persecuting Trump and his supporters. The final verdict was delivered by the voters, who decided Trump was the expression, not the enemy, of democracy.

The Capitol riot will be remembered by history as a mistake, but January 6 will just be a normal day.

Happy January 6, America.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.