Power: Kerry Howley

Revenge Does Take Time' What it's like to be on Trump's enemies list.

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"THEY SAY ANGER is a secondary emotion," someone who has much to fear from the incoming administration told me last week. "So whatever's under that is..." He paused. He had, throughout our conversation, veered relentlessly toward the general, away from the intensity of his experience. "Whether it's fear, some sense of injustice, or a need being deprived, it's hard."

The man for whom it is hard is a straitlaced middle-aged former official who spent decades working in government, a small percentage of that time having been devoted to national-security and legal concerns surrounding Donald Trump. He was an insider until he wasn't.

"People aren't thinking creatively enough," Andrew McCabe told Politico in September, "about this whole idea of the revenge tour."

The notion that this might be a productive civic assignmentthink creatively about revenge tour-is still new to most of us, but it was not new to McCabe, who had himself been targeted; it was not new to the Insider; and it was not new to people on what has come to be called, with alarming alacrity, "the enemies list."

There is the list, and there is the list. The enemies list in broad circulation is an Excel file with more than 200 names organized by offense ("RINO," "Trump Impeachment," "Afghanistan Withdrawal") compiled by Ivan Raiklin, a former Green Beret who calls himself Trump's "secretary of retribution."