Former President Donald Trump turned a Manhattan courthouse into a bully pulpit this week, creating photo ops and sound bites of him railing about his civil fraud trial for his presidential campaign to blast out on social media and in fundraising appeals.
But this publicity spectacle earned him a lesson: Judges can impose real-world consequences for what he says or does out of court.
State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron issued a partial gag order on Tuesday hours after Trump attacked a law clerk in a since-deleted online post. Federal prosecutors are keeping tabs, too, cataloging the former president’s social media vitriol in court papers and alerting a judge that he recently skirted violating the conditions keeping him out of jail ahead of trial.
