The list of lies Donald Trump told during his long and meandering Mar-a-Lago press conference isn’t short, but NBC News highlighted one of the most striking: the former president’s rhetoric about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“You know, with Hillary Clinton, I could have done things to her that would have made your head spin. I thought it was a very bad thing. Take the wife of a president of the United States and put her in jail,” he said. Trump said he was “very protective” of Hillary Clinton and falsely suggested that he would tamp down chants by his supporters to have her locked up.

As part of the same remarks, the Republican nominee said Clinton — who, as a former senator and Cabinet secretary, was more than simply the wife of a former president — was “pretty evil,” but in Trump’s version of events, he nevertheless responded to “lock her up” chants by telling his followers, “Just relax, please. We won the election.”

For now, let’s not dwell on the fact that it was rather creepy to hear Trump declare that he could have “done things” to Clinton “that would have made your head spin.” Instead, let’s consider the underlying point of the rhetoric.

The subject is on my mind in part because I talk about this in my new book — which comes out in just a few days — but Trump is rewriting history with a specific goal in mind. In the GOP candidate’s counternarrative, he was “very protective” of his 2016 rival after the election, in part because of his deep commitment to propriety, and in part because he believed it was wrong to use the levers of governmental power to pursue a political rival.

As part of the same story — a counternarrative he’s pushed before — voters are also supposed to believe that those rascally Democrats, however, abandoned these principles and prosecuted him after his 2020 defeat, failing to follow the magnanimous example he established a few years earlier.

There’s just one fairly obvious problem: Trump’s version of reality is utterly bonkers.

As regular readers know, Trump publicly and privately begged prosecutors to charge Clinton. Ahead of Election Day 2020 — nearly four years after Clinton’s defeat — the then-Republican president again publicly called for the Democrat’s incarceration and lobbied then-Attorney General Barr to prosecute the former secretary of state for reasons unknown.

None of this was kept secret. It happened out in the open. We all saw it play out in public — all of which makes it a strange thing for the GOP presidential nominee to keep lying about.

As for the idea that Trump was uncomfortable with his followers’ “lock her up” chants, and he graciously told them to “just relax,” reality tells a very different story. He not only spent four years in the White House trying to prosecute Clinton — the opposite of “relaxing” — a recent Washington Post report noted, there are “several instances in which Trump called explicitly for Clinton’s jailing and others in which he agreed with his supporters’ chants.”

What’s more, it’s also worth emphasizing for context that Clinton didn’t deserve to be prosecuted, because there was no evidence of her committing any crimes. A jury, on the other hand, recently examined evidence and found Trump guilty of 34 felonies.

To be sure, I understand why the former president is trying to rewrite history. Trump now wants the public to believe he took the high road against his former rivals, unlike those Democratic meanies who insist on holding him accountable.

In reality, however, Trump desperately tried to weaponize federal law enforcement against his perceived foes — especially Clinton.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.