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NEW YORK Call it the anti-diversity administration.

President Donald Trump is on course to reverse decades-old efforts to empower and protect minorities. Affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are being reviewed by the Justice Department. Trump supports curbs on immigration of non-English speakers and proposed a ban on transgender people in the military. He says its time to stop political correctness.

But civil rights advocates promise him a fight at every turn and a philosophically divided Supreme Court will likely be the final arbiter on the most contentious issues.

Trumps backers say the change in tone is welcome. Diversity is a way of justifying discrimination hiring people based on their race, and thats a violation of federal law, said Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Thats what the prior administration wanted to ignore.

Conservative commentators like Bill OReilly and Glenn Beck, and websites including the Drudge Report and Breitbart have railed against political correctness for years. Whats new is that the culture warriors now have a backer in the highest office in the land against rights advocates.

We must stop being politically correct, Trump wrote on Twitter in June, criticizing the mayor of Londons response to a terror attack attributed to radical Islamists that left seven dead. If we dont get smart it will only get worse.

Trumps stance appeals to his mostly white base, which has felt left behind in a country where it will be a minority by midcentury. His policies are also a sharp rebuke to predecessor Barack Obama, the first black president, and a vocal advocate for diversity.

Although the majority of Americans say an increasingly diverse population is positive the percentage of whites has fallen from 84 percent in 1965 to 62 percent in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center there is a deep political divide. According to a Pew poll last year, 78 percent of Democrats agreed that immigrants strengthened the country compared with 35 percent of Republicans.

From executive orders to early-morning tweets, Trump has used every means to get his anti-diversity message across. His administration is a reflection of his attitudes. Eighteen of the 24 Cabinet members are white males. Thats a break from the trends of earlier presidents, who had increasingly surrounded themselves with more women advisers and people of different races. About a third of Obamas Cabinet was composed of white men.

The administration will have to fend off legal challenges to the presidents anti-diversity policies. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have sued to overturn Trumps actions, often with the support of coalitions of Democratic state attorneys generals.

The administration is also looking to the courts to further its agenda. The Justice Department intervened in an employment lawsuit, arguing that federal gender-discrimination laws shouldnt apply to sexual orientation, reversing course from the past decade of court rulings.

The U.S. Supreme Court, where justices are divided between conservatives and liberals, is already set to decide in October whether Trumps travel ban is constitutional. The make up of the court may change to become more conservative if members of the liberal wing retire in the next two years, as the challenges to Trumps policies wind through lower courts.

Even if some or all of these efforts fail to get off the ground or crumble in court, they send a message to Trumps base that the embrace of diverse groups that was a signature of the Obama administration is no longer a go.

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Trump's anti-diversity stance sparks culture wars - The Recorder