Holocaust Museum Softened Content After Trump's Return

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum scaled back programming on American racism and democratic vulnerability after President Trump returned to office, Politico reports, according to internal communications and former staffers. Sometime after Aug. 29, 2025, for instance, the museum removed from its website a page titled "Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow," which had offered lesson plans linking US segregation and Nazi racial policies, including resources on African American soldiers in World War II and Afro-Germans during the Holocaust. A related 2018 video discussion between a Holocaust survivor and the daughter of a lynching victim remains available only via direct link, now unlisted on the museum's YouTube channel.

The museum, which is federally funded but independent and not part of the Smithsonian, said in a statement that the Trump administration "has not requested any changes" and called the claim that it had backed away from the content false. Two former employees said they believed the content changes and program cuts were anticipatory responses by museum officials to the administration's campaign against diversity-related materials across federal institutions, and to the president's intervention at the Smithsonian. "It seems like they were trying to proactively fall in line as to not then be forced to change," one of the people said.