It was terrifying because I knew he meant it. And America truly did emerge from the Obama years transformed—almost unrecognizable. He’d added more debt than nearly all of his predecessors combined. He fundamentally changed many aspects of American life: the government got in the business of healthcare and student debt. Taxes went up. Gas prices reach record highs. He forced schools to let boys play on girls’ sports teams. He imposed an insane number of regulations and established the dangerous precedent of governing via executive action.

Barack Obama ran as an uniter, but he really governed as a transformer. Someone who would do anything in his power, and even exceed his own power, to change America into a left-wing utopia.

Similarly, Joe Biden ran as a uniter and a healer. He was going to bring Republicans and Democrats together and achieve compromise. If you listened to any so-called anti-Trump Republican who planned to vote for Biden, they actually believed this. They believed Biden was going to work with both sides. Never mind that he repeatedly disavowed his more moderate positions of the past. Never mind that he chose a San Francisco liberal as his running mate.

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Yet, here we are again, twelve years after Obama’s reign of left-wing terror, and we have Joe Biden turning his back on his repeated pledges of unity to not only pursue a left-wing agenda but a transformational one. A former defender of the filibuster, he now wants to get rid of it to rubber-stamp an agenda that could never achieve bipartisan approval. He’s issued more executive orders in his first weeks in office than any of his predecessors.

Biden knows that even if he can make it through four years, he’s most likely going to be a one-term president. And with only four years to get things done and make his mark on history, we’re seeing an agenda that, while built on the foundation of Obama’s transformative presidency, actually seeks to eclipse it. According to a report from the Washington Examiner, Biden has been “studying Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson because he want[s] to be in the same league as his most successful liberal predecessors.”

Remember, this is the same guy who ran on his so-called multi-decade career as a moderate.

Make no mistake about it, we have now reached the point where we’re no longer one generation away from tyranny. We’re now one presidency away from tyranny at any given time. This isn’t hyperbole, this is real life.

Think of it this way: Would we be talking about “Vaccine Passports” if Trump was still president?

Need I say more?

Despite Obama’s transformative presidency, we’re already seeing certain elements on the left saying he didn’t go far enough—particularly with immigration. “President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty,” claimed Maureen Dowd in the New York Times last month,” while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.”

Imagine that. How could anyone suggest that when it came to the radical left agenda that Obama didn’t put the pedal to the metal?

We can be grateful that Trump defeated Hillary in 2016, but we’ve now entered a period of American history where the pendulum representing America’s political direction swings back and forth so rapidly that each president sees his time in office as a desperate race to make his mark in an unprecedented way. Obama did it. President Trump spent four years trying to clean up his mess. Perhaps in four years a Republican will win and clean up Biden’s mess. But messes like Obama’s and Bidens leave stains on America, and who knows if there will ever be a way to go back.

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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter, Gab, Facebook, MeWe, Heroes, Rumble, and CloutHub.