joe biden
© Evan Vucci/APJoe Biden pitching his infrastructure "plan".
In his first 100 days, Joe Biden has redefined what it means to run a progressive presidency. To those paying attention, his radicalism was clear from the start.

In a primary full of socialists, President Joe Biden clinched the Democratic nomination and rode his way to the White House on the appearance of a supposed moderate, a pragmatist who promised an American "return to normalcy" in a 21st-century digital version of the early front-porch campaigns.

To those paying attention, however, Biden's radicalism was clear from the start, with normal nowhere in sight. He ran on a platform cloaked in centrism only by virtue of what others were proposing on stage. Even McClatchy wrote in September 2019, "Biden's current set of policy prescriptions would likely be considered radical if they had been proposed in any previous Democratic presidential primary."

The following summer, Biden's platform was taken over by California Sen. Kamala Harris joining the ticket and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders dominating the discussions for the "Unity Task Force Recommendations" to unite Democrat support after a highly fractured primary. Harris accepted the vice-presidential nomination as a senator with the hardest left voting record in the upper chamber, even to the left of Sanders, an open socialist. So true to form, Harris was characterized as a "pragmatic moderate" by the corporate press.

In Biden's first 100 days, the new president has conformed to his promise to aggressively govern in pursuit of a progressive, partisan agenda, dismissing dollars as finite while weaponizing the federal government to mandate leftism in the culture wars. By August last year, Biden's platform included plans for another $10 trillion in spending. By May of this year, Biden's price tags have already hit $6 trillion, with nearly $2 trillion signed and trillions more in the pipeline for Democrats' central-state planning by way of infrastructure and the expansion of the welfare state.

Yet while spending soars, provoking comparisons of Biden as the 21st-century Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new president launched his first 48 hours in the White House with a hard-left assault on the culture wars, wielding the power of the pen to unilaterally enact sweeping social policy on issues from the erasure of women's sports to open borders.

Biden signed 17 executive orders by the weekend of his inauguration, more than were issued in the first month of their presidencies by Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton combined. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden signed 40 executive orders within his first 100 days, surpassing every predecessor for most orders signed in the same time going back to Roosevelt. It's a convenient way to circumvent republican governance, when Biden has only signed 11 new bills so far — less than most predecessors — in the absence of a legislative mandate.

Biden only captured the White House by less than 43,000 votes across three states, with a Senate evenly divided and the House narrowly controlled by the same party. In other words, the American public by no means demanded a fundamental transformation of their country, but that's what they're getting.

On his first day, Biden signed an executive order effectively eliminating women's sports with the mandated inclusion of men who identify as women in girls' leagues at any institution that receives federal tax dollars.

Biden has also aggressively pushed for passage of the Equality Act, a campaign pledge he reiterated in his first address to a joint session of Congress, a majority of whom watched from outside the chamber. Despite the deceptive label, the Equality Act, introduced in March, is by no means a genuine step towards equality. Rather, it punishes Americans who dissent from the leftist dogma on gender identity and sexual orientation.

On immigration, it's no coincidence the United States faces the worst border crisis in decades just weeks into the Democrat administration. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection took in more than 172,000 illegal aliens in the busiest month in more than 20 years as migrant detention facilities overflow far beyond even pre-pandemic capacity.

The influx of migrants was explicitly provoked by Biden's adamant demands for an open border, dating back to his soft rhetoric on immigration from the campaign trail. Central American caravans began to make their way to the southern border the moment Biden's election was announced in November.

"He's going to help all of us. He's giving us 100 days to get to the U.S. and give us legal [unclear] papers, so we can get a better life for our kids, and for our families," one Honduran migrant told CNN on the trip in January as Biden prepared to take office.

Within his first 100 days, Biden halted construction on the southern border wall, tried to implement a moratorium on deportations, reinstated Obama-era protections for the undocumented, and ended Trump's effective "Remain in Mexico" policy that kept asylum seekers on the other side of the border until processed for legal entry.

Biden is all for the left's critical race theory, a revolutionary ideology to seek the fundamental transformation of American society, tasking White House Domestic Policy Council lead Susan Rice with "rooting out systemic racism" as the focal point of her mission.

In schools, Biden's Department of Education has pushed grants to make classrooms "incorporate teaching and learning practices that reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students." Works encouraged in curriculum to achieve those goals include The New York Times' anti-American "1619 Project" and Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist.

No issue has been left untouched by the new administration redefining the standards of what it means to run a progressive presidency in the post-Obama era. Biden reinstated taxpayer-funded overseas abortion, called for new restrictive gun laws, and even weighed in on state voting laws to condemn voter ID laws as a relic of Jim Crow, as if the idea black people can't obtain a valid ID to vote isn't racist itself.

But The New York Times' analysis of the new administration is "a nothingburger on the culture wars."

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.