But some conservatives view that language neutrality as a mechanism for pushing back on what they see as undue efforts to aid minorities. This has been especially true in higher education, where a pair of lawsuits by Abigail Fisher argued that she had unfairly been denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin because of its affirmative-action policy—a claim rejected by the Supreme Court. Statistics don’t suggest discrimination against white students; in fact, at top-tier schools, black representation has actually fallen in recent years. (Discrimination logically only comes into play at selective schools.)

But the Trump administration came to office with a message that catered directly to white grievances on cultural and economic issues. Trump spoke directly to white working-class concerns, used frequent dog-whistle language about minorities, and did little to court voters of color. He drew significant public support from avowed white nationalists. In a post-election poll, almost half of Trump voters said they thought whites faced “a lot of discrimination,” more than voters that said blacks, Hispanics, Jews, or Muslims did—a result that’s widely divergent from the populace overall, which deemed whites least likely to suffer from serious discrimination. A PRRI/The Atlantic poll in November asked white working-class voters whether “efforts to increase diversity almost always come at the expense of whites.” Only 16 percent of Clinton voters, but 49 percent of Trump voters, agreed. (This might also explain the recent turn among Republicans against colleges.)

So even if there isn’t really much discrimination against whites, it feels to Trump voters like there is, making initiatives like this one an effective means of satisfying Trump’s core supporters. They also play interestingly into Trump’s troubled relationship with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Why would Sessions stay in the job even as Trump publicly rips him? Sessions has long been skeptical of affirmative action and other attempts to expand civil-rights protections, and now that he has control of the Justice Department, he is using it to forward many of his pet causes, including tough-on-crime policies, harsh sentencing for low-level drug offenses, and voter-ID laws. Even if the president is criticizing Sessions, he’s still giving him a forum to do things like the anti-affirmative-action push.

Although the Trump administration is unusual for its embrace of white grievance and white nationalism, the Justice Department’s policy initiative against affirmative action has some precedent. The Justice Department during the administration of George W. Bush also radically reoriented the civil-rights division, including using laws historically used to protect minorities in novel ways to police discrimination against whites. (These are sometimes referred to under the infelicitous and illogical rubric of “reverse discrimination.”) Some veteran civil-rights attorneys were assigned to work on immigration and deportation cases. But those efforts ended in an attorney general’s resignation, a devastating Inspector General’s report, and a broken civil-rights division.