She says it felt like a small death.

Not just the crash of stone and steel, but the erasure of a life lived under the harshest lights in America.

As cameras lingered on the rubble, she picked up her pen—and aimed it straight at the man now sleeping in her old backyard.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a warning.

She writes about corridors that smelled of floor polish and fear,

about Christmas trees dragged in at midnight, about the hushed arguments that echoed through the East Wing when the cameras were gone.

To her, that demolished wing is not architecture; it is childhood, compromise, and the fragile belief that institutions outlive the people who occupy them.

Now, watching the president’s allies laugh off her anguish as “political theater,” she understands something darker:

the fight is no longer just over policy, but over memory itself.

If a president can recast the people’s house as a personal monument, then every future occupant is tempted to do the same.

Her op-ed is less an attack than a plea—that the country see the wreckage not as an upgrade in progress, but as a mirror of what it is willing to forget.