Efforts to hold Donald Trump accountable are testing the legal system in unprecedented ways. Judges are struggling with how to rein in the former president’s inflammatory rhetoric while balancing the free speech rights of a political candidate.

Donald Trump isn’t used to constraints.

The former president ignores and antagonizes anyone who tells him no. He built a business — and later political — brand as someone who says and does what he wants, largely without consequence. Even after losing the White House, Trump remains accustomed to deference, surrounded by people who greet him with nightly standing ovations at his clubs and cheer his most outrageous lies.

But Trump came face-to-face with a new reality Wednesday when he was called to the witness stand and fined $10,000 for violating a gag order prohibiting him from attacking court personnel in his New York civil fraud case. Trump denied he was referring to a senior law clerk when he told reporters in the courthouse hallway that someone “sitting alongside” Judge Arthur Engoron was “perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”

Engoron wasn’t having it.

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    But Trump came face-to-face with a new reality Wednesday when he was called to the witness stand and fined $10,000 for violating a gag order prohibiting him from attacking court personnel in his New York civil fraud case.

    But the courtroom drama previews the tensions mounting between Trump’s competing legal and political interests as he vies for the Republican presidential nomination while facing a litany of criminal and civil cases.

    And it underscores how efforts to hold Trump accountable are testing the legal system in unprecedented ways as judges struggle with how to rein in the former president’s inflammatory rhetoric while balancing the free speech rights of a political candidate.

    But Trump has turned the camera-lined hallway outside the courtroom into his own personal campaign stage, holding impromptu press conferences multiple times a day as he enters and exits the room.

    In 2017, a federal judge in Brooklyn revoked the bail of pharmaceutical company CEO Martin Shkreli, who had been convicted of fraud, and sent him to jail after he went on social media and offered a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could get him a strand of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s hair.

    Prosecutors asked late Wednesday for the gag order to be reinstated, citing recent social media posts about Trump’s former chief of staff that they said represented an attempt to influence and intimidate him.

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