Question: When is President Joe Biden going to announce he’s running for reelection? Answer: He already does it every day. Not in so many words, but his policy actions speak louder, and even hollow and temporary changes of policy say as much as any official declaration.

Biden will fail to follow through on his sudden policy adjustments, but they’re coming thick and fast because he has to repair rips in his case for another White House term.

My colleague, Byron York, has written about Biden’s sudden efforts to cast himself as tough on immigration, an issue on which he is 44 points underwater in polls because of the disaster he’s created on the southern border. His abject mismanagement drew a record 2 million-plus illegal immigrants into the United States in 2022, five times as many as in the year before he took office.

To muddy the waters on immigration, he’ll do what he did on spending. With that, he used the $2 trillion federal deficit of 2020, the year of the COVID recession, as his baseline and bragged that its decline to $1.4 trillion by 2022 made him fiscally responsible for “the largest one-year drop in American history.” He treats voters as fools who can’t see through the sham. If he cuts illegal immigration, let’s say by 25%, expect him to argue in 2024, “I cut record illegal immigration by 500,000 — more than any president in history.” Yadda, yadda!

This is an old political trick — screw things up and create a mess, and then when you make a few repairs, you hope to win praise for them while not getting any blame for creating the crisis in the first place.

Biden is now, supposedly, an immigration hawk, not a border destroyer; a deficit cutter, not a profligate spender; an inflation fighter — remember the laughably named Inflation Reduction Act — not a mad modern monetary theorist; and is also suddenly tough on crime, not the criminals’ best friend.

It's a shell game. The trickster Biden juggles his rhetoric so his intended dupes — Republicans and voters — are briefly confused about what his policy really is. Is it what he said yesterday or what he said the day before?

The shell game is also known as a “short con” because it is quick, simple, and easily executed, and it can be reversed whenever the trickster feels like it. Biden’s new ersatz toughness on fiscal matters, the border, inflation, and the rest is a short con. His policy seems to move, but it is all sleight of hand.

Why is Biden signaling policy moves? Because he knows his real policies are unpopular when people can see what they are and how they fail. If he knows that, why doesn’t he change them to policies people want and that do work? Because he doesn’t have a firm conviction in his body. The only thing he’s sure of is that he wants to be president for a second term. So he’ll drift along indefinitely on the leftward flood of his party’s agenda.

All the rest is just empty words.