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.