He Sues. They Ask to Put Him Under Oath. He Discovers a Matter of National Importance. Twenty Years of the Same Calendar, With the Dates.

The BBC wanted him in a chair on October 16. His lawyers said the nation needed him. The nation turned out to be a rally in Dalton, Georgia, and a fundraiser at his club. It never has been.

A magistrate judge in Florida named Enjoliqué Lett has a hearing on Thursday. The question before her is whether the president of the United States, who filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC last December, can be made to sit for a deposition in it. He’s the plaintiff. He chose the court. The BBC, as its lawyer put it in a filing this month, didn’t ask to be here, and the man who sued it “accepted the obligations of civil litigation” when he did.

Here’s the calendar. The BBC asked for deposition dates in July. After two months of follow-ups the two sides agreed on October 16. On September 28 the president’s lawyers wrote that he was “no longer available” on October 16 “due to other matters of national importance,” and promised a new date by the end of the week. No date came. In the first week of October they wrote that he “has no availability whatsoever” before discovery closes on December 18, and offered January. The BBC went back to the docket and found what the matters of national importance were. On October 16 the president held a campaign rally in Dalton, Georgia. The other commitment was a Republican National Committee fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.

On Friday Judge Lett issued an order noting she had already “admonished” him once for his “lack of participation,” that the BBC had been filing discovery requests on its own because of his “disregard” of her procedures, and that “the failure of which will lead to sanctions.” This is the man who sued.

The rule he wrote for himself five months ago

The same president has a defamation suit pending in Florida against the Pulitzer Prize Board. In that case the Board asked the court to pause everything until he left office, on the ground that a sitting president shouldn’t be pulled away from his duties for a libel suit. His lawyers fought the request. In May the Fourth District Court of Appeal sided with him. The president, Judge Mark Klingensmith wrote, is “uniquely equipped to determine how to use his time,” and the Board, “a willing participant,” had no standing to tell him otherwise. The court took care to distinguish the New York cases where Trump, as a defendant, had used the presidency to delay. Here he was the plaintiff, and if he wanted to spend presidential hours suing, that was his business.

So in May the president’s position in a Florida court was that the presidency leaves him time to prosecute a libel suit. In September his position in a Florida court was that it leaves him no time to be questioned in one. Both positions were filed by lawyers paid to say whatever gets him out of the chair. The appeals court gave him the first. Judge Lett has the second on Thursday.

Since Forbes started counting, he has spent a portion of 27.5 percent of his days in this term at a golf property, 165 outings in the first 600 days. None of those appear in the filings as the matters of national importance. The rally and the fundraiser do, because the BBC’s lawyers looked.

October 2023, in which the deposition was on a Monday

He sued Michael Cohen for $500 million in April 2023, in the same Florida district, for breaching a confidentiality agreement by writing books and talking. Cohen’s lawyers asked to depose him. The date was set for Monday, October 9. On Thursday, October 5, he dismissed the suit. His spokesman said he’d refile after he “has prevailed in dealing with the witch hunts against him.” On Monday he was at a campaign event in New Hampshire. He has not refiled. Cohen called the suit “a retaliatory intimidation tactic” and said the dismissal “marks the end of this latest attempt to deter me.” It did.

January 2020, in which the presidency was the reason

Summer Zervos sued him for defamation in 2017 for calling her a liar. He fought the suit for three years on the theory that a sitting president can’t be sued in state court. In January 2020, weeks before a deadline for his deposition, he asked New York’s highest court to freeze the case until he left office. It did. When he left office the court said the question was moot, the case went back to the trial judge, and the judge set a deposition deadline of December 23, 2021. Zervos withdrew the suit in November. Nobody ever put him in the chair. The presidency, which in Florida in 2025 was no obstacle to his suing, was in New York in 2020 an absolute bar to his being questioned, and the difference was which side of the caption he was on.

October 2022, in which he couldn’t get out of it

E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers wanted him deposed in the fall of 2022. His lawyers asked for a delay. Judge Lewis Kaplan, on October 12, called his “position regarding the burdens of discovery” “inexcusable,” said he “should not be permitted to run the clock out,” and ordered him to sit the following week. He sat, at Mar-a-Lago, on October 19. Shown a photograph of Carroll, he identified her as his second wife, Marla Maples. He called Carroll’s account a hoax. Two juries later found him liable, for $5 million and then $83.3 million. That is what happens on the occasions he can’t find a matter of national importance, and it’s the reason he looks so hard.

December 2007, in which he sat, and learned

The template is nineteen years old. He sued the reporter Timothy O’Brien for writing that he was worth far less than he said. O’Brien’s lawyers deposed him on December 19 and 20, 2007, and the transcript is the most consequential document in the president’s public life. Over two days they caught him in about thirty false or unsupported statements. His stake in a Manhattan project was 50 percent, then 30. A speech paid “over a million” was paid $400,000; he counted the publicity. Golf memberships sold for $300,000 were $200,000. Asked whether he’d been truthful about his net worth, he said it fluctuates with markets and with his feelings. The suit was dismissed in 2009 and the appeal in 2011. He said afterward that the point had been to cost O’Brien money, and that in this respect the suit was a success.

He has not sat for a deposition as a plaintiff since. Every suit he’s filed in the years after, against CNN, against the New York Times, against the Pulitzer Board, against the Journal, against Cohen, against the Register, against the BBC, has either died before the chair, settled before the chair, or arrived at the chair and found him unavailable.

The rest of the record, briefly

In January 2018 he said of a Mueller interview, “I would love to do it,” under oath. He never did. He answered written questions in November and said he did not recall more than thirty times. In September 2016 he told a crowd in Iowa that “the mob takes the Fifth,” and asked, “if you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” In August 2022, deposed by the New York attorney general, he took it more than 400 times. When the January 6 committee subpoenaed him in October 2022 he sued to block it and the committee ran out of calendar first. When a federal judge in Iowa was about to rule on the Register’s motion to dismiss his suit over a poll, he dismissed it himself and refiled in state court, on the Monday before Iowa’s new anti-SLAPP law took effect on the Tuesday. The Register called it “gamesmanship.” The lawyer defending the pollster called the moves “obvious and improper.”

What the calendar says about the man

Put the entries side by side and a character emerges that no single filing shows. He sues because the suing costs the other side money and he said so under oath in 2007. He doesn’t answer questions because the one time he did as a plaintiff he was caught thirty times in two days. When the question is whether he can be sued, the presidency is a wall. When the question is whether he can sue, the presidency is no obstacle at all, and a court has now written that down for him. And when a date arrives, the matter of national importance that keeps him from the chair is, every time anyone has checked, a rally, a fundraiser, a campaign stop, or a round of golf.

It’s the same technique he’s using on Ukraine this week, applied to a war. Asked who capped the drones: “it wasn’t me.” Asked by whom, then: it “sort of happened.” Asked under oath, the answer would have to be one or the other, which is why there is no oath. The whole public method, from the net worth that moves with his feelings to the satellite setting that nobody ordered, is a man arranging never to be the one who has to say, in a room where lying costs something, what he did.

Thursday’s hearing is one of those rooms. Judge Lett can order him to sit, or accept January, or sanction him. Whatever she does, the record above says what he’ll do: find something of national importance, and be somewhere else.