Has there ever been a presidential administration more deeply defined by the personality traits of the sitting president than this one?

America knows President Donald Trump well: His innate lack of empathy toward the weak, most recently demonstrated with his gutting of foreign food aid; a long history of racism, from his days as a redlining real estate mogul to his promotion of “birther” conspiracies to his presidential embrace of white nationalist supporters; a blithe contempt for the rule of law, which, like most rules, Trump thinks doesn’t apply to him.

All these traits are vividly on display with a new refugee policy that is at once racist, cruel and very likely illegal in how it’s being implemented. It’s also a repudiation of America’s long, proud stature as a beacon of hope to the world’s most vulnerable victims of persecution.

Under the new policy, announced late last month, the U.S. will limit annual acceptance of foreign refugees to just 7,500 people. That’s down from 125,000 last year and is the lowest limit in the 45-year history of the nation’s current refugee program.

No explanation has been publicly given for that drastic reduction. As usual, the administration announced the policy without even consulting Congress, a seemingly blatant violation of a law requiring such consultation.

And — in what literally sounds like the punchline of an anti-Trump joke — most of those precious few spots are being set aside for white South Afrikaners, who don’t even fit the standard definition of “refugees.”

Refugees are people who flee their home countries in demonstrable fear of persecution. Historically, they have been from war-torn countries or those with oppressive policies toward ethnic or religious minorities: Iraq, Ukraine, various African and Latin American governments.

The refugee program isn’t about border issues or asylum-seekers who are already here. Refugees are vetted and approved before they are brought in, generally from foreign refugee camps or other enclaves of the persecuted.

In that sense, the fixation on Afrikaners is not just racist but nonsensical. As a population, Afrikaners haven’t fled their country and in fact there’s precious little evidence of the administration’s claims they face racial persecution by the Black-majority government. As The New York Times recently reported, South African police data doesn’t indicate whites are more likely to be crime victims than Blacks. Other data shows that, even now, decades after the end of white-minority rule and apartheid, average white Afrikaners still enjoy economic advantages over average Black citizens.

For actual refugees, look to Afghanistan, where some citizens who aided the U.S. during our war there now face persecution and possibly death for that assistance.

Yet not only are those refugees being denied the kind of special carve-out being offered to Afrikaners, but the administration earlier this year ended special humanitarian protections that had been created for Afghans who had already settled in the U.S.

That means these people whose lives are in danger for helping America are now vulnerable to possible deportation back into the clutches of the Taliban. Trump clearly feels no shame at that betrayal, but every other American should.

The administration says it didn’t consult Congress about the miserly new refugee policy in advance, as is required, because it was announced after the government shutdown, and that it will consult when the government reopens. That’s not consultation, that’s telling a co-equal branch of government after the fact that you’ve already done something you had no authority to unilaterally do.

Most Americans who supported Trump last November were voting for lower inflation and a secure border. What they’ve largely gotten instead are federal troops on American streets, tariff-driven market chaos and an openly politicized and abusive Justice Department.

And, now, a refugee policy that spurns this nation’s just and generous nature in favor of a stingy, cruel, racist slamming of the door in the faces of the world’s most vulnerable victims. That may be consistent with Trump’s character, but not with America’s.

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