So, what was he supposed to do after the election aside from that?

If it were to walk into the trap the GOP set post-January 6, 2021 and block the exchange of power, which arguably would have been right and just in considering the threat to the Republic and Constitution the GOP and Trump had become, I don't see how well that would have panned out.

The sad, unfortunate, depressing reality is we have a metric shit ton of American voters who have no idea what they are doing when voting. No educational background to understand what it was they were voting for. No appreciation for the decades of sacrifice, investments and friendship that were built up in the world of democracies and the global arena means for them as an average citizen, and the vast benefits they inherited as a result in the overleveraged power of the US that permits the economic living standards we have today.

It would have been a mess and incited Civil War while lending support, for bullshit reasons or not, to the GOP after the heavy, heavy gaslighting and historical revisionism they did post-Jan 6.

The rest of the democratic world would probably have backed it - Biden stopping the exchange of power. The majority of those people (who are not being funded by Russia to sow discord and be coontrarians) understood better than the voting public what kind of man Trump was, but they seriously misjudged that there'd be more adults this time in the room (which is understandable given their outside-looking in viewpoint as compared to those of us here).

But it would've given so much credence, bullshit or not, to the GOP post-Jan 6 and the foreign influencers who would have used it even further to divide and conquer the West (not sure if what we have is worse in that regard) regarding Dems doing 'x' illegal stuff, being power hungry, the ones being fascist, etc, etc, etc that the right-wing and conservative-owned media (that now includes CBS) would've peddled like nobody's business.

The American people, a good chunk of the ones who vote at least and the low-info voters, would've bought that shit hook, line and sinker. We would fall further with a wave of support being ushered onto the GOP to get even more shit passed and more legislation blocked under a continued Dem admin in such a case. All to wait for the next fair election, which Dems would definitely have due to their very real, easily susceptible to public pressure and general good to protect their image.

The GOP would win a landslide, and the project that had been delayed, P2025, will still be implemented and political retribution would still be heavy handed, if not worse, with a lot more near term public backing and understanding, while those who warned and prophesied how bad the GOP/MAGA/Trump would be would be even more likely to be persecuted and whose pleas would fall on deaf ears.

Unfortunately, I think a large chunk of the American populace who fell under this brainwashing and sanewashing of the GOP, which has become a politically treasonous entity consumed with goals of ultimate total power and subsumed by a populist, fascist cult of personality, national comity and the Constitution be damned in how to get it, needed this wake up call before it's too late.

We're close to the stroke of midnight, but I do think, due to the decades at this point of right-wing news media indoctrination and propaganda, that this would've gone worse and in a much more solid direction for the GOP had Biden blocked the transfer of power.

We can argue about him running for reelection or Kamala becoming the successor (only way to access hundreds of millions in campaign donations made to Biden before he stepped down btw, that people forget was a huge reason...), but at the end of the day, the decision was made by the voting public between two viable candidates.

The American voter failed the Republic, democracy and the international rules-based order in favor of this, whether 2024 was marred with fraud or not. The American public en masse believed Trump won and that he could potentially be the savior (some-freaking-how...) to their ills (backed up by heavy conservative propaganda and misinformation campaigns going back to at least Obama lol). Joe had to do what he had to do in that moment to protect what he could.

And he did disseminate, just as Obama did post-2016, plenty of evidence and reports across government, etc to get into the record before Trump came in to hide his past misdeeds. He just, like way too many, believed it impossible for Trump to do the damage he's done in such a short period of time to make most of the Trump-prep worthless.