15 November—The list of the good, upstanding, honest, principled people upon whom Donald Trump is determined to wreak vengeance for respecting the Constitution, obeying and enforcing the law, having the scrotal content and chutzpah to criticize him, or simply not kissing his corrupt self-dealing ass is bound to dwarf Richard Nixon’s notorious Enemies List.

More in the future (hopefully) on the absolutely and unquestionably worst, most corrupt president America has ever suffered. Suffice to say for now is that Trump’s second term—which, despite the insistence of his cesspool of sycophants, isn’t really a mandate and which he needed to keep out of prison—promises to be even more autocratic, corrupt, and disastrous than his first. And above all else it will be four years of savage, likely unlawful retribution.

And that takes us back to Nixon’s Enemies List. That’s what White House Counsel John Dean—who, incidentally, has reformed and is a harsh critic of Donald Trump—called what was officially known as the Opponents List and the Political Enemies Project. It was a score of paranoid President Nixon’s major political opponents compiled by his lackeys in 1971 and included politicians, journalists, business executives, and outspoken actor Paul Newman.

The original Enemies List became public knowledge only in 1973 in Dean’s testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. A much, much longer second list was made public by Dean later that year in testimony before the Congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation.

Dean’s confidential memo to another White House lackey tells the story:

It must be noted that IRS audits are a common and not ineffective form of political revenge. But Nixon’s recently appointed IRS commissioner, Donald Alexander, refused to allow audits on Nixon’s enemies simply because they were on the dreaded list. Of course, Nixon tried to fire him more than once but for whatever reasons couldn’t. He wasn’t Trump, after all. Alexander also did away with the notorious IRS Special Service Staff, which had been weaponized against critics of Nixon’s administration and its policies in Vietnam.

Yet, at least one person who was on the extended Enemies List for an unexplained reason as well as members of his family, one of whom is a Monitor reader, were in fact audited by the IRS during the last days of the Nixon administration.

A trip to https://www.enemieslist.info/list1.php is well worth taking . . .