Was he really paid $1 million for a 2005 speech, as he had boasted on television? He was not. (It was $400,000; in testimony, he said he counted efforts to promote the talk as a form of payment.)

Did his debts ever reach $9 billion in the 1990s, as he said in two of his books to dramatize his eventual financial comeback? They did not. (“That is a mistake,” Mr. Trump said, “and I don’t know how it got there.”)

But, he said, it hardly mattered. “Frankly, whether it’s $9 billion or $3.6 billion,” Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think makes any difference to anybody if they hear the story.”

In words that echo now that he is a candidate, Mr. Trump compared his own inclination toward blurring the facts to a strategy he learned from America’s elected officials.

“I’m no different from a politician running for office,” he said. “You always want to put the best foot forward.”

The lawsuits for which Mr. Trump was deposed stemmed largely from real estate deals that went bust. In two of the cases, Mr. Trump was accused of misleading home buyers about his role as a developer of condominium towers in Florida when he was in fact licensing his name to the projects.

In a third case, he was the accuser, leveling claims of defamation against Timothy O’Brien, a reporter for The New York Times at the time who asserted in a book that Mr. Trump’s net worth was far less than he had publicly claimed. (Mr. Trump settled with plaintiffs in one condo case; he won the other. He failed to prove his case against Mr. O’Brien.)