By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, ERIC TUCKER and JILL COLVIN Associated Press
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NEW YORK — 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.

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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. 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.

“I find that the witness is not credible,” he concluded before issuing the fine. Minutes later, Trump stormed out of the courtroom in an apparent fit of anger.

The $10,000 holds little financial consequence for a wealthy defendant who flew to his appearance aboard a private jet.

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.

“It’s really a new frontier for the legal system, and the legal system is really struggling with how to control this man who has no respect for the rule of law,” said Jimmy Gurule, a Notre Dame law school professor.

The court system has never encountered this type of defendant. Trump is not only a former president, but also the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He has turned his legal fights into a centerpiece of his campaign while also painting himself as the victim of coordinated political persecution.

Lawyers typically tell criminal defendants to stay quiet, knowing prosecutors can use any utterance against them.

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. He also broadcasts his grievances on his social media platform, where he regularly slams Engoron as “a Radical Left Democrat” controlled by New York Attorney General Letitia James “and her Thugs.”

Gurule said courts are hamstrung in trying to punish Trump the way they would normal defendants because of his position and personal wealth. A $10,000 fine is unlikely to deter someone as rich as Trump. And while Engoron floated the possibility of holding Trump “in contempt of court, and possibly imprisoning him” for further violations, jailing an ex-president who is under Secret Service protection would present enormous logistical challenges, in addition to the grave political implications of putting a leading political candidate behind bars.

The absence of meaningful consequences raises questions about whether Trump’s prominence has allowed him to exist under a “different standard of law” than other defendants, Gurule said.