“I saw a photo and my heart just dropped”

October 24, 2025

Good evening, Meteor readers,

I’ve just stepped off a plane from Vienna, so I’m jet-lagged and 40% pretzel.

Tonight’s newsletter is even saltier, featuring upcoming election news, Malala Yousafzai’s new memoir, and a powerful conversation between The Meteor’s Rebecca Carroll and Deesha Dyer, who was the White House Social Secretary during the Obama administration and worked out of the now-demolished East Wing for much of her tenure.

Let’s get to it.

Mattie Kahn and The Meteor team

WHAT’S GOING ON

This week, President Trump took a literal wrecking ball to the East Wing of the White House and referred to its demolition as “the beautiful sound of construction.” But this was an historic space, with a legacy that meant something to a lot of people. (It has housed the office of every First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, for starters.) Several Democrats have pledged to investigate Trump’s “renovation,” and the public wants answers.

In the meantime, though, those who worked in the East Wing are grieving—including former White House Social Secretary Deesha Dyer, who held that job during the last two years of the Obama administration. To get a sense of what this moment means, Rebecca Carroll called her.

DEESHA DYER WITH THE OBAMAS (COURTESY OF THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE)

Rebecca Carroll: It must feel so surreal to have been part of the first Black presidential administration in the White House, and to experience this demolition in real time—can you put that into words at all?

Deesha Dyer: I can’t. It’s hard, Rebecca. I’ll be honest with you, because right now we’re having so many fights on so many other fronts. This morning I was helping a family get food and find housing. I avoided the photos [of the East Wing] and the conversations, because right now I need to focus on the basic needs of people. And then I saw a photo, and my heart just dropped. It affected me more than I thought it would. Because what we see, as one of my colleagues said, is a metaphor for everything happening right now. The destruction of the East Wing is a destruction for so much of what’s happening in our neighborhoods, in our communities.

And as hard as it is going to be to ever rebuild the East Wing back, that is how hard it’s going to be to rebuild everything back.

RC: Can you imagine a scenario in which President Obama would ever have been like, “I’m going to demolish…anything”?

DD: No. He couldn’t even wear a tan suit. You know what I mean? I remember we had an event doing yoga in the East Room of the White House, and it was like, “Can we do that? Is it okay to lay yoga mats down on this historic floor?” Anything that we did, we did with extra scrutiny. I can’t even imagine if President Obama had cut down a bush outside of the White House. It would’ve been: “How dare you do this to America? You’re desecrating the country!”

RC: You noted on Threads this week that three Black women have run events in the East Wing, including yourself, and you ran those events for the first Black First Lady. How symbolic does it feel that Trump chose the East Wing to demolish?

DD: Very symbolic. That’s where the First Lady’s office has always been, and so it symbolizes what he thinks about women in general—and women in power specifically. The East Wing is also where people enter for tours and celebrations and all types of events. So it also says a lot about what he thinks about opening up the house, and making it really the people’s house. … This is a property that is paid for by taxpayers. It is the people’s house. So it is not his.

RC: And did you and the former First Lady ever have any conversations about the significance of the East Wing?

DD: Definitely. All the time. Mrs. Obama talked to the entire staff about what her vision was for the East Wing and the White House. She always wanted to make it so it felt like everybody’s house. We made sure that from the minute you stepped in the door, you felt like this is a place that considered who you were, whether it was your culture, whether it was your family, whether it was anything. It’s jarring to see that all just gone.

RC: What does that space mean to you personally?

DD: I’m a Black girl from Philly—a hip-hop writer who had a community college education. I was also in charge of bringing to life the vision of Mrs. Obama and President Obama. And so for me, the space means possibility and hope. And we know that the history of the White House is not all grand. We know the implications of it being built by slaves. But we did our best to make sure that people saw themselves in it. That yes, our ancestors built the building, but we can dance in it. We can have joy in it. We can have our art in it. We can have our music in it, and be happy about that.

RC: How are you taking care of you right now?

DD: I’ll keep it a buck, I’m not. I’m constantly thinking, “This is terrible. This is a mess.” I’ll be on a walk with my husband and get a call about a food bank or a family in need. And so it’s hard to take care of myself at this time. But I have to remember that I am a Black woman in this country that is a product of systems. I have type two diabetes and high cholesterol and high blood pressure. And so the system is also trying to kill us softly while it’s trying to kill us fast too. I need to continue going to therapy and taking my medicine and encouraging other people…. I’m not probably doing the best I could taking care of myself, but I’m trying.

THIS WEEK’S DEMOLITION OF THE WHITE HOUSE’S EAST WING (GETTY IMAGES)

AND:

One month ago today, Adelita Grijalva won a special election to become Arizona’s newest member of Congress—filling the seat her father held before he died last spring. She celebrated! She moved to Washington! And then she waited, since House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to swear her in (for reasons many suspect have something to do with the fact that Grijalva would be the deciding signature in favor of releasing the Epstein files). Anyway, yesterday Grijalva took action, joining Arizona’s attorney general in filing a lawsuit against Johnson asking him to stop playing politics and get on with it already. “Let’s do it now,” she told The New York Times. “I have a Bible.”
In related news: Election Day is under two weeks away, which is unfair, considering the hangover you might still have from the last one. But there’s a lot happening—from the big races for mayor of New York City and governors of Virginia and New Jersey to the people in charge of your utility bill in Georgia and your abortion rights in Pennsylvania. Find out just how soon you can vote and where to go, and do it.

Even Nobel Peace Prize winners need help. Earlier this month, Malala Yousafzai released her second memoir, Finding My Way. The book documents her life in college—and what happened after the well-documented trauma of her childhood. (She survived an assassination attempt in 2012; the Taliban had targeted her for her activism on behalf of women and girls.) This week, in an interview with Fresh Air, she spoke about all that and more, including her struggles with anxiety and depression: “I just felt so disappointed with myself that somebody who faced a Taliban gunman was somehow now scared of these small things,” she said. “And then one of my friends suggested that I see a therapist.” Credit to that pal, wherever she is.
The looming cuts to Medicaid have been in the news since Trump passed his definitely big, decidedly not beautiful bill, but new work requirements—Medicaid enrollees will have to prove that they’re working or have an exemption, a process that perhaps sounds like NBD, but is in fact onerous—are just beginning to go into effect, and the impact is being felt nationwide. Read this in the New York Times for a devastating reminder of how policies affect the real lives of real people.
Wondering what the real deal is with testosterone treatments, which are being heralded as a wonder cure for low libido and energy in women? (“I had to take [my doses] down because I was humping everything,” one Real Housewives of Orange County star said.) Susan Dominus—whose reporting on menopause helped usher in our era of new awareness on that topic—is out this week with the definitive investigation of the serious risks and apparently orgasmic rewards of this treatment which, like so many other aspects of women’s health, has failed to be properly investigated by health institutions.
In a word: Welp.
And now for something nice: Siren! Alert! It’s Zadie Smith on glamour.