While there's a great deal of understandable outrage over Donald Trump's revoking of John Brennan's security clearance for entirely political reasons, it's also completely unsurprising. Trump has made it clear that his decisions are motivated primarily by whatever will make him feel good in the moment, whether it's applause at a campaign rally or just petty vindictiveness.

So while Trump may have cited security concerns and "erratic behavior" as his reasons for taking the ex-CIA chief's clearance away, he's also undermined that by basically admitting that people are now being nice to him so he won't do the same to them. So it's not surprising that Brennan isn't even the highest-profile person Trump has looked into punishing this way.

A new piece from The New Yorker details how Brennan has tried to position himself as a public critic of the president, a plan that led him to his own personal Twitter account (Brennan told The New Yorker's Adam Entous that initially the platform made him “very uncomfortable, quite frankly,” which is the only appropriate response to Twitter). But the story also revealed a new detail about another target whose clearance Trump considered revoking: Barack Obama. Per The New Yorker:

At the time, some of Trump’s most fervent supporters in the White House saw former Obama Administration officials as powerful enemies who threatened the new President’s rule, and they agitated for punishing them by revoking their security clearances. The idea was rebuffed by the national-security adviser at the time, H. R. McMaster, who signed a memo extending the clearances of his predecessors at the N.S.C., Republicans and Democrats alike. As Trump stepped up his public and private attacks on Obama, some of the new President’s advisers thought that he should take the extraordinary step of denying Obama himself access to intelligence briefings that were made available to all of his living predecessors. Trump was told about the importance of keeping former Presidents, who frequently met with foreign leaders, informed. In the end, Trump decided not to exclude Obama, at the urging of McMaster.

Trump has denied the account on Twitter, but he's also made more than 4,000 false or misleading claims since taking office, so it's hard not to take that with a grain of salt. What we do know is that he has terrible impulse control and tends to agree most with the last person who spoke to him, so the timeline in The New Yorker’s account certainly seems plausible. After all, with McMaster no longer in the White House, Trump finally went through with revoking Brennan's clearance. We'll have to wait and see if he finally does the same to Obama to own the libs.