Finally, Donald Trump has been defeated, roundly. But Joe Biden’s victory, though consecrated on January 20, will take a long time to settle.

The win so far is for American democracy. Trump axed himself in the foot so thoroughly that his “Trumpism” may never take hold now. He will be remembered in history as the messiah whose disciples failed to overthrow American constitutional democracy when they stormed its temples.

Trump pledged an orderly transition on January 20, in a statement on Thursday after Congress affirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win.

He was unrepentant. “Even though I totally disagree with the outcome of the election, and the facts bear me out, nevertheless there will be an orderly transition on January 20th,” Trump said. “I have always said we would continue our fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it’s only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again.”

Biden will certainly sit in the Oval Office. But right now it does not look like he and his team of former Obama technicians have something so new to say to the angry half of America that it will grasp his outstretched hand.

Trump’s promise to fight on may be bravado and Trumpism may fall by the wayside because he, as a person, was repudiated during those fateful hours by the people he admires the most – his peer group of America’s business titans.

Even those for whom he made the most money, recoiled at the sight of hordes clambering up the stairs and into the halls of their beloved country’s hallowed legislature.

They included the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the American Bankers Association, the US Travel Association, and the chief executives of JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citigroup, Dow, GM, IBM, Salesforce and Wells Fargo.

The shock made them realize that they are rich and successful because America is a liberal democracy with peaceful transfers of power that inspire confidence in American stability and faith in rule of law. The world’s businesses prefer to cultivate relationships with the US because its systems of governance and legal redress are more predictable and rules-bound than elsewhere.

The marauding inside the corridors and offices of Congress and Senate gave the lie to long-held beliefs about America as the safest place for business. It is no longer a democracy founded on consensus among all its people. As such, facing competition from authoritarian monoliths like China and Russia will be harder.

The assault on the Capitol will surely reverberate for years in democracies around the world as warning sirens of the perils of letting divisions among voters fester in emotions of injustice. When so many people are enraged at not being heard, democracy itself loses credibility.

The majority of the world’s countries are not democracies. For their authoritarians, another proof of the hatreds that fire up brawling Americans will bring solace. A US riven by internal divisions will be too weak to breach the walls that keep their own citizens in subjugation.

The vast majority of the world’s nations are no longer those that Barack Obama saw when he entered the Oval Office. The US is also a profoundly changed country, so Biden’s America and his administration will not be offered the goodwill Obama received even without asking.

For seven decades, Americans quarreled and punched below the belt in their numerous elections steeped in shady money while everyone closed their eyes to the flaws in its democracy’s systems.

Wednesday was the wakeup call. Trump’s personal behavior may have cost him Trumpism’s future but all the grievances that motivated his supporters to storm the Capitol remain alive.

Biden’s exhortations about decency and honor is not the balm he imagines. He will need much more than new veneers on Obama’s rhetoric. The world is no longer as hospitable a terrain as it once was for the exercise of American exceptionalism.

While COVID-19 rages, the bewilderment of US federal and state governments is plain to see. Powerful actions are needed on many fronts to erase foreign perceptions of this, combined with a besieged Capitol. A beleaguered Biden administration may be too fragile to earn enough credibility to undertake them.