President Joe Biden declared Wednesday that half the country were extremists.

“This MAGA crowd,” he said, referring to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, “is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history — in recent American history.”

That’s right — more extreme than the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam, and even the murderous neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, a favorite Joe Biden talking point.

At a press briefing afterwards, press secretary Jen Psaki tried to justify Biden’s remarks: he was referring, she said, to the “extreme comments and extreme positions that are, unfortunately, overtaking far too much of the [Republican] party.”

She gave an example: Republicans are “at war with Mickey Mouse,” she said. She was referring to the new parental rights law in Florida that Disney opposes, but which is supported not only by Republicans but also by a majority of Democrats in the state.

The only “war” is Biden’s war against the half of the country that did not vote for him.

His rhetoric is a stark departure from the lofty promises of his inauguration, when he declared: “To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity. … Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.”

If his “whole soul” was in it, we ought to be concerned for his spiritual well-being, because it was a promise that he broke almost immediately, and continues to break.

Upon taking office, he pushed for a second, pointless impeachment trial for former President Trump.

Later, President Biden declared — repeatedly, and despite criticism — that Republicans’ efforts to pass voting reforms were “21st century Jim Crow,” referring to the notorious racial segregation laws Democrats once defended.

But in this latest attack, Biden has crossed a line. He is no longer simply advocating a divisive policy, or using a divisive analogy. He is attacking millions of Republicans directly — and doing so while actual violent extremists, from his own side of the political aisle, attacked police in the streets of Los Angeles to oppose the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Given that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security is devoting law enforcement attention to domestic “extremists,” his rhetoric is chilling.

But there is method to the madness.

Biden is using the same tactic that his old boss, former President Barack Obama, used in 2010 when the Tea Party wave threatened to wipe Democrats out of Congress.

Obama, with the help of the establishment media, concocted the idea that the Tea Party was a racist movement, using lies such as the false claim that the Tea Party had used the “N-word” against black members of Congress during a Capitol Hill protest against the passage of Obamacare.

The tactic could not save the House for Obama. But it probably helped in the Senate, where several Tea Party-backed candidates lost winnable races in Delaware, Nevada, and Alaska.

In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Obama doubled down on the tactic. Democrats falsely accused the Tea Party of motivating the mass shooting in Tuscon in January 2011, and Obama’s IRS helped out by preventing many Tea Party groups from raising money as non-profit organizations.

Obama broke the rules: instead of reaching out across the aisle, as Bill Clinton had done, and as people once hoped Obama would, he sought to motivate his base using fear. It was effective — though it fueled the backlash that later brought Trump to power.

The Obama alumni who control Biden hope to repeat the anti-Tea Party strategy. But it may not work: Biden has no support among his party’s base.

And, frankly, Americans have had enough of being attacked by the people who work for us.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.