Following his 2024 win, President Donald Trump required help from aides because he couldn't remember the names of the people he promised to retaliate against.
That's the scene described in "Regime Change," a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
One of the targets was Chris Krebs, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — fired by Trump in November 2020 after he publicly declared that year's election "the most secure in American history."
But in a meeting with senior staff, including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and longtime aide Boris Epshteyn, Trump outright forgot his name.
"I remember there was this lawyer who was in the administration who said the election was fair and there's no fraud. Who was he?" Trump asked, according to the book.
"Oh the DHS — I think you're talking about the DHS guy," Miller replied. "I forget his name."
Epshteyn then Googled it.
"Yeah, Chris Krebs," Trump said. "Whatever happened to him? He was a bad one. Take a look at him."
Haberman and Swan write that Miller then had a presidential memo drawn up, "unleashing the resources of the federal government on a man whose sole offense against Trump had been to attest to the security and validity of his 2020 election."
The anecdote lands as questions about Trump's memory mount. Earlier this year, during a New York Magazine interview, Trump blanked on the word "Alzheimer's" while discussing his father's decline — turning to press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who supplied it.
"Well, I don't have it," Trump said.