Thursday was not a great day for Donald Trump. The Republican and suspected felon was forced to fly to Atlanta, where he was arrested, subjected to the booking process, and forced to take a mugshot — a historic first for a former American president. It was, Trump told Newsmax, a “terrible experience.”

It was around the same time when the former president used social media to promote his mugshot, alongside text that read, “NEVER SURRENDER.” It was a curious choice of words: The image was obvious evidence of a man who’d just surrendered to authorities.

Nevertheless, before Trump returned to one of his golf clubs, he briefly spoke to journalists at the Atlanta airport. From his unscripted remarks:

“Thank you so much for being here. I really believe this is a very sad day for America. This should never happen. If you challenge an election, you should be able to challenge an election. I thought the election was a rigged election, a stolen election. And I should have every right to do that. As you know you have many people that you’ve been watching over the years that did the same thing whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams or many others.”

The former president went on to peddle a variety of similar claims, which he’s pushed before. He described his indictment as “a travesty of justice”; he insisted he did “nothing wrong”; prosecutors and grand jurors are engaged in “election interference”; he still thinks the election was “very dishonest”; and so on.

But it was his reference to Clinton and Abrams that stood out. Do you remember when the former secretary of state and former gubernatorial candidate launched scandalous and multifaceted initiatives to overturn their election defeats?

Well, no, chances are you don’t remember that, because that never happened. As my MSNBC colleague James Downie explained:

Of course, neither Clinton nor Abrams nor anyone else in modern American history has sought to overturn the Electoral College. No one else has encouraged officials to create alternate slates of so-called fake electors. No one else has asked the governor of a state to “find 11,780 votes.” No one else pressured a vice president to intervene in the electoral vote count. And no one else encouraged his supporters to come to Washington the day of the count and then sat on his hands for hours after they invaded the Capitol. Other than those and many other differences, though, it’s “the same thing.”

Clinton conceded defeat the night of the 2016 election and attended Trump’s inauguration. Abrams was understandably critical of what transpired in her statewide 2018 race — her opponent and the Georgia official responsible for administering the election were the same person — but she never tried to launch a legally dubious scheme to overturn the results.

But for Trump, there’s a reflex of sorts that kicks in when confronted with real trouble. As his classified documents scandal intensified, for example, the Republican tried to convince people other modern former presidents did “the same thing.” That was ridiculously untrue, but he pushed the line anyway.

When Trump separated migrant families, he said the Obama administration had done “the same thing.” This was plainly false, too.

And now that Trump has been charged with a variety of crimes related to his election defeat, the public is effectively hearing, “What about Clinton and Abrams? Didn’t they do the same thing?”

This rhetorical tactic would make far more sense if the former president could find actual examples of others doing what he’s done, but so far, he’s failed to do so.