Perhaps the most head-spinning statement of the Biden years came about a week ago when President Joe Biden endorsed an impending Senate immigration deal, now defunct, so he could “shut down” the border.

This, after the president had dismantled all the Trump policies that had secured the border; after Biden and his minions had refused for years to call the chaos at the border a “crisis;” after doing all he could to re-direct illegal immigrants to newly created legal channels to launder them into the country through different means.

Then, all of a sudden, when the calendar flipped from 2023 to the election year of 2024, Biden sounded like a Donald Trump-style border hawk.

The Senate deal represented Biden’s best chance to try to escape the border morass of his own creation. The latest NBC News poll highlights the president’s dilemma — he trails Trump by 35 points on who would do a better job securing the border.

The Senate tanked the bill. It was unlikely to pass.

What Biden and the Democrats were hoping was that they could turn the politics of immigration on its head by blaming Republicans for rejecting a solution to the border out of sheer partisan cussedness and loyalty to Donald Trump, who vociferously opposed the deal.

“We need help,” Biden said after the bill was released. “Why won’t they give me the help?”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, asked: “Will the senators drown out the political noise from Trump and his minions and do the right thing for America? It’s a crucial question. History is looking down on every one of us right now.”

It’s not obvious when Democrats began to think that cracking down on the border is the way to be on “the right side of history,” but clearly a memo went out sometime over the last month.

It’s not as though Biden has been trying his utmost to control the border — using executive orders, creative interpretations of the laws and any other tool at hand — and then in frustration came to Congress for new authorities because he’s exhausted every one he already has.

He’s ignored the pleas for help from border states, disregarded the distress of big city Democratic mayors, and looked away from the damning images of long lines of illegal immigrants from all over the world walking into the country.

It’s unclear how much Biden can get from this, given that he’s president and the border failures have been on his watch.

The GOP’s posture should be, “You, Mr. President, say you want to be a border hawk. Well, we think you already have the ability to do much more than you’re doing now, but regardless, here’s a new, unmistakable codification of your ability, nay, responsibility, to exclude all illegal immigrants. Have at it.”

If Biden took a new GOP deal, it would represent a complete surrender. If he rejected it, as is likely, it would once again show his lack of seriousness about border security.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review