In a post Friday, I observed that there was a lot of hot air in former President Trump’s bluster, on a golf course in Ireland, that he would “probably” fly back to the U.S. to “confront” E. Jean Carroll. That still seems to be the case.

With the evidence seemingly closed in the trial of Carroll’s claims that Trump raped her in 1996 and then defamed her after she wrote about it in 2019, Judge Lewis Kaplan gave the former president’s lawyers until 5 p.m. Sunday to request that Trump be permitted to testify. Despite his chest-beating from over 3,000 miles away, the deadline came and went with no such request made.

It appears, then, that summations will commence this morning. I say “appears” because there could still be some gamesmanship.

I actually thought the former president’s play would be to say he intended to testify but couldn’t do that until later in the week, or even after that, because he is running for the GOP presidential nomination. He’d know that Judge Kaplan would deny such a motion – given that Trump decided to be in Europe playing golf instead of in attendance at the trial, there is no reason that he could not have been in court to testify last Thursday, after Carroll’s lawyers rested their case. Trump would then say the judge was barring him from testifying and that this was yet another demonstration that the proceeding was rigged against him, blah, blah, blah.

Something like that could still happen. It is as clear as it could be, though, that Trump does not want to testify under oath and be subjected to cross-examination. That doesn’t mean he committed the rape, which he vigorously denied in the pretrial deposition. But cross-examination could involve questions about areas he’s avoided addressing, such as the civil fraud case brought by New York’s attorney general (in which he took the Fifth about 450 times during his recent deposition) and his retention of classified documents that is under investigation by the DOJ-appointed special counsel (a matter in which he has claimed that he declassified the documents – a claim his own lawyers have declined to repeat in court because there is no supporting evidence).

It appears that Trump hopes the jury will find him not liable for sexual battery and defamation, and that, if he is found liable, Plan B is to claim that he could not get a fair trial in New York where, he’ll continue to say, Kaplan was hostile to him and steered the jury into finding against him.