At the Defense Table, Trump Uses the Courtroom as a Stage

He shook his head in anger, sitting with his back hunched. He spoke to his lawyers, his words sometimes quite audible to the packed courtroom. He wrote instructions for his defense team that he shoved their way. He walked in late at one point, and at another, while a lawyer suing him was speaking to the jury, he stalked out.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s behavior as he attended the defamation trial that ended on Friday with a jury ordering him to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll — and his similar conduct in a pending civil case in New York — showcased his disdain both for a legal system seeking to hold him accountable and for the protocols of courtrooms where he has little control.

His use of the defense table as a stage also provided clues to the public, and a reminder to his own legal team, of how he might handle himself if and when any of the four criminal cases he is facing go to trial. In all of those cases he will be required to be present throughout the proceedings, unlike in the Carroll case or the New York attorney general’s case accusing him of business fraud, both civil trials in which he was free to attend or not as he wished.

Even as he was moving toward wrapping up the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Trump appeared at five days of the Carroll trial in the cavernous, wood-paneled federal courtroom in Manhattan of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a veteran, no-nonsense jurist who has handled notable terrorism cases. And in recent months he sat for many days of the trial a few blocks away at 60 Centre Street, where Justice Arthur F. Engoron of State Supreme Court oversaw the fraud trial against Mr. Trump and his company.

Mr. Trump, who has long conflated legal problems with public relations