Donald Trump is threatening the judges presiding over his trials — and their families. This disgraceful conduct is nothing new.

Trump learned how to game the courts from his mentor, the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn. He taught Trump how to play the system, how to threaten reprisal, how to attack, how to delay — and how to get away with it.

Trump later added a few chilling ingredients to the recipe: threaten the judge, his family, even his law clerk, with the veiled innuendo of political violence.

This is not a left/right issue. Threatening judges and their families, and exposing them to violence, crosses a red line in any civilized society.

In his criminal case in New York, involving a payoff to a porn star, Trump’s extrajudicial comments have warranted a gag order because, as the trial judge Juan Merchan put it, Trump had a history of issuing “threatening, inflammatory denigrating” remarks about participants in his various cases.

Under the order, Trump can’t target witnesses or jurors. He can’t talk about court staff, the district attorney’s staff or the staff of any of the lawyers. And he can’t talk about the lawyers, whether his own or assistant DAs. The notable exception is that he can talk about District Attorney Alvin Bragg himself, with the loophole that he can trash the judge and the judge’s family. The DA is seeking clarification of the order to make it apply to families of participants in the case.

Last year, during Trump’s civil........

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