NYT columnist: 'More outright white nationalists than black people' in Trump administration

Responding to reports that yet another appointee in Donald Trump's administration is a white nationalist, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg made an only-slightly-hyperbolic reference to the White House's diversity problem.

In mid-August, former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman revealed that when she left the White House, she was the only black person "at the table" -- and that no African Americans have been hired in her stead.

Days after Manigault-Newman's revelation, White House speechwriter Darren Beattie was outed as having ties to white nationalists and was subsequently fired.

Just over a week later, The Atlantic's Rose Grey revealed that former Homeland Security policy analyst Ian Smith is also tied to prominent white nationalists like Richard Spencer and a former leader of a since-disbanded neo-Nazi group. Grey confirmed to MSNBC host Chris Hayes that Smith was a "political appointee" and not a career civil servant.

"I think that one conclusion we might want to draw from this is that this is a white nationalist administration," Goldberg said in an interview with MSNBC's Chris Hayes. "Not everybody in the administration is a white nationalist but it's certainly an administration that has white nationalist policies [and] white nationalist sympathies."

The columnist pointed to Trump's tweet promoting the "white nationalist conspiracy theory" that a "genocide" of white farmers in South Africa is taking place before directing the State Department to investigate the widely-debunked claim.

"There are, I would wager, more outright white nationalists in this administration than there are black people," Goldberg said.

Watch below, via MSNBC: