Congress certified President-elect Donald Trump as the winner of the 2024 election in proceedings Monday that unfolded without challenge, in stark contrast to the Jan. 6, 2021, violence as his mob of supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Lawmakers convened under heavy security and a winter snowstorm to meet the date required by law to certify the election. Layers of tall black fences flanked the Capitol complex in a stark reminder of what happened four years ago.

The whole process this time concluded swiftly and without unrest. One by one, a tally of the electoral votes from each state was read aloud to polite applause in the House, no one objected and the results were certified.

“Today, America’s democracy stood,” Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, said after presiding over the session — as is the role of her office — and her own defeat to Trump.

But Trump’s legacy from 2021 leaves an extraordinary fact: The candidate who tried to overturn the previous election won this time and is legitimately returning to the White House, his inauguration in two weeks.

While Monday’s outcome revived a U.S. tradition that launches the peaceful transfer of presidential power, what’s unclear is if Jan. 6, 2021, was the anomaly or if this year’s calm becomes the outlier.

Trump said online Monday that Congress was certifying a “GREAT” election victory and called it “A BIG MOMENT IN HISTORY.”

With pomp and tradition, the day unfolded as it has countless times before, with the arrival of ceremonial mahogany boxes filled with the electoral certificates from the states — boxes that staff were frantically grabbing and protecting when Trump’s mob stormed the building last time.

Senators walked across the Capitol — which four years ago had filled with roaming rioters, some defecating and menacingly calling out for leaders, others engaging in hand-to-hand combat with police — to the House to begin certifying the vote.

The House chaplain, Margaret Kibben, who delivered a prayer during the violence four years ago, made a simple request as the chamber opened to “shine your light in the darkness.”

Harris stood at the dais where then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi was abruptly rushed to safety last time as the mob closed in and lawmakers fumbled to put on gas masks and flee, and shots rang out as police killed Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter trying to climb through a broken glass door toward the chamber.

And Harris certified her own defeat — much the way Democrat Al Gore did in 2001, Republican Richard Nixon did in 1961 and then-Vice President Mike Pence did four years ago.

When Harris read the tally, the chamber broke into applause: first Republicans for Trump’s 312 electoral votes, then Democrats for Harris’ 226.

Vice President-elect JD Vance had joined his former Senate colleagues in the front row, and was surrounded afterward with congratulatory handshakes, hugs and photos.

Within half an hour the process was done.

There are new procedural rules in place after what happened four years ago, when Republicans echoed Trump’s lie that the election was fraudulent and challenged the results their own states had certified.

Under changes to the Electoral Count Act, it now requires one-fifth of lawmakers, instead of just one in each chamber, to raise any objections to election results.

But none of that was necessary.

Republicans who challenged the 2020 election results now express greater trust in U.S. elections after Trump defeatedHarris.

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., who led the House floor challenge in 2021, said people at the time were so astonished by the election’s outcome and there were “lots of claims and allegations.”

This time, he said: “I think the win was so decisive. … It stifled most of that.”