President Trump’s taunt that he’s toying with the idea of fleeing to Russia’s gilded onion domes in response to the bail conditions imposed on him by a Georgia judge brings into focus the tension between the strictures faced by criminal defendants and the liberties accorded to presidential candidates. 

Mr. Trump has announced he will turn himself in on Thursday. As he put it, “Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney.” Yet the former president will be in custody only momentarily. That is because he has accepted a bond agreement for pretrial release. Its terms, though, could eventually spell trouble for Mr. Trump’s near-term liberty.

The pact mandates that Mr. Trump “perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.” While a similar order is in place for the two federal cases against the former president, the Peach Tree State version adds something new.

In Georgia, where bail for Mr. Trump has been set at $200,000 — he will be required to pay 10 percent of that sum on Thursday — the agreement encompasses “posts on social media or reposts made by another individual on social media.” Mr. Trump is also ordered to “make no direct or indirect threat of any nature against the community.” 

On Tuesday alone, Mr. Trump “reposted” no fewer than eight supportive posts by other members of his Truth Social network, some of which referred to President Biden as a corrupt committer of “TREASON” and “Dark Brandon.” He called the district attorney prosecuting the case, Fani Willis, “crooked, incompetent, & highly partisan.”

Mr. Trump also noted on Truth Social, “The failed District Attorney of Fulton County (Atlanta), Fani Willis, insisted on a $200,000 Bond from me,” and, “I assume, therefore, that she thought I was a ‘flight’ risk — I’d fly far away, maybe to Russia, Russia, Russia, share a gold domed suite with Vladimir, never to be seen or heard from again.”

The former president appeared to downplay that possibility, continuing, “Would I be able to take my very ‘understated’ airplane with the gold TRUMP affixed for all to see. Probably not, I’d be much better off flying commercial — I’m sure nobody would recognize me!” Risk of flight is a consideration in respect of bail in Georgia. 

Even should Mr. Trump abjure the possibility of sharing a Winter Palace suite with President Putin, the agreement — and its federal counterparts — could spell further trouble for the former president on these shores. He canceled a press conference last week because, as he put it, his “lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings.”

Restrictions on what Mr. Trump can say while remaining a free man could influence the course of the Republican primary campaign, in which he is the favorite. One television commentator, Ainsley Earhardt, speculated on Fox that Mr. Trump “might not want to get on” the stage for tomorrow’s debate — he’s appearing on Tucker Carlson’s social media show instead — “because his lawyers might say you can’t talk about it.”

To incentivize Mr. Trump’s compliance short of jailing him, the state judge overseeing the case, Scott McAfee, could look toward his federal counterpart, Tanya Chutkan, who reasoned with respect to Mr. Trump that the “more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case, which could taint the jury pool,” the “greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly.”

The prospect of a state court judge actually ordering a former president — and leading presidential candidate — to be jailed is unprecedented. All it could take, though, would be for Judge McAfee to look askance at one of Mr. Trump’s more intemperate Truth Social postings and order him locked up in the Fulton County Jail, which has been called a “a public health nightmare.”

The famously germaphobic former president could find himself behind bars alongside an A-list rapper, Young Thug, who’s also being prosecuted for conspiracy by Ms. Willis and has been in pretrial detention for more than a year. His attorney call that experience “torture.”   

While pretrial agreements are a feature of American criminal law, freedom of speech could yet play a role in the ultimate question of Mr. Trump’s innocence or guilt, if not at trial then, ultimately, on appeal.  

A line to remember in this regard is the Supreme Court’s holding that the First Amendment “has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office.” That was quoted by Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in his motion to dismiss the charges Mr. Meadows himself faces in Georgia.