President Donald Trump’s tearing down of the White House East Wing’s facade has faced criticism, but the renovation is only the latest of over a century of redesigns.

Several of these involved tearing down or gutting significant parts of the White House, to a greater extent than the most recent ballroom renovation. The White House itself was quick to respond to outrage over pictures of the East Wing facade being torn down by a backhoe, arguing it was the continuation of a “proud presidential legacy.”

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This week saw the debut of a new alliance in the ongoing resistance to President Donald Trump. New York Attorney General Letitia James, already a hero on the left for the 2022 lawsuit she filed in an attempt to cripple Trump’s business empire, joined Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in a rally that was nominally about Mamdani’s campaign, but also about James’s defense against mortgage fraud charges brought against her by the Trump Justice Department. And in a larger sense, it was about the face of the Resistance in the second Trump administration.

James’s message was defiance, defiance, defiance. “I know what it feels like to be attacked for just doing your job,” she shouted, as James shouts a lot in her campaign appearances. “But I also know what it feels like to overcome adversity. And so I stand on solid rock, and I will not bow, I will not break, I will not bend, I will not capitulate, I will not give in, I will not give up. You come for me, you gotta come for all of us.”

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If you listen carefully, you can hear two distinct sounds — one of anxiety, the other of laughter — coming from Washington, D.C. Each is muffled but not very well.

The first is of timorous Democrats promising to keep the federal government shut until Republicans add $700 billion more to the national debt. They want to hang tough, but they know they are between a rock and a hard-left place.

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