EDITORIAL: Biden won; it’s time to move on.

The 2020 presidential election is over, even if the tension and threat to democracy remain.

President Donald Trump lost. Former Vice President Joe Biden won, and he will be sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021.

These aren’t opinions or speculation. They aren’t observations springing from political bias or the articles of faith rooted in religion.

These are facts. And they remain facts even as Trump and his personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani sow chaos and doubt about the election, seeking to stop the certification process in key states Biden won, hoping to have state lawmakers invalidate the vote of the people by installing Trump electors. Even as Trump’s legal minions spread falsehoods about voter fraud — a rhetorical disenfranchisement of nearly 80 million voters — and a baseless conspiracy theory about a rigged election with roots in Venezuela. It’s reprehensible.

That Biden, legitimately and decisively, defeated Trump is as much a fact as it is that humans require oxygen to live; that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West; that the number one comes before two, and 46 follows 45.

The late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts — meaning we can have as many opinions on as many facts we choose, but the opinions don’t alter what is factual.

We are a nation with a long history of polarization by political ideology, race, economic inequality and religion, but we’re becoming more divided into those who believe in verifiable and objective facts, and those who choose not to believe because the facts aren’t what they want, or aren’t the same as espoused by the media and political figures they follow.

It has been two weeks since Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election. It has also been two weeks since Trump has not only refused to concede the race but also lied that he won and the election was stolen from him (in tweets, which are regularly flagged by Twitter as misleading and inaccurate).

His behavior has been indulged by spineless Republicans afraid or unwilling to tell Trump that this is foul; in some instances they have furthered his efforts. His supporters marched last weekend demanding that Democrats “Stop the Steal.”

Steal what? Ask the roughly 79 million voters who chose Biden as the next president. It is unprecedented to have the outcome of a presidential election be so brazenly denied by the loser and his supporters.

Even the most childish of games have rules by which the players must abide. If the rules keep changing, the game is no longer worth playing.

Democracy isn’t a game. It’s not a chess board in which the losing player, unhappy with how the game is going, can claim victory by swiping the pieces to the floor. Our nation’s founders believed in the facts yielded by science, math and the laws of nature. The democratic form of government they crafted was premised on the idea that Americans, while having myriad opinions on all issues, still shared core values, including respecting the outcomes of elections.

Imperfect as it is, American democracy has been sustained by a faith in our shared values, confidence in our electoral process and a fidelity to the facts.

When facts are dismissed as inconvenient, trust is corroded. Mistrust and outright hostility infect our politics when Americans no longer see as legitimate politicians for whom they didn’t vote; and it infects our public health when the advice of public health experts amid a deadly pandemic is ignored.

On Nov. 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln, resolving that the dead should not have died in vain, ended his Gettysburg Address by envisioning a new birth of freedom and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth.”

But a government will perish if there are no longer facts, like an election outcome, upon which the people can agree.

Associated Press file photo