🔗 Share this article

Donald Trump rarely accepts guidance, particularly from foreign leaders who often attempt to flatter and admire the US president.

But, the Central American nation's strongman president Nayib Bukele has adopted a different strategy by urging the Trump administration to follow his example in impeaching what he terms “corrupt judges.”

The call for the president to take action against the American court system also received support from Maga figures, such as an X post by former supporter Elon Musk, who has previously boosted Bukele's demands to oust US judges.

Unprecedented Threats to Judicial Independence

Analysts say that the leader's recent remarks occur of unprecedented dangers to judicial independence and specific justices in the US, and during a phase where the president's team is using comparable strong-arm tactics used by leaders in countries such as Türkiye, Hungary, the Asian nation, and his native El Salvador to undermine democratic accountability.

The president's online call recently was just the latest in a long series of taunts and claims he has made against the American judiciary, including a March assertion that the US was “experiencing a judicial coup,” and ridicule of a court's order to stop deportation flights transporting accused illegal immigrants to his nation's brutal correctional facilities.

Attacks on Oregon Justice

Bukele's impeachment call was also made during social media criticism on the state's justice Karin Immergut by presidential advisor Stephen Miller, former AG Bondi, Elon Musk, and the president personally in a latest media briefing.

Immergut had issued restraining orders blocking Trump from mobilizing the national guard, initially in Oregon then in California. Trump has been pushing to send troops into Portland, which the president has characterized as “war-ravaged” based on limited, non-violent protests outside the city's federal building.

Record of Attacking Justices

The advisor, Bondi, and the entrepreneur have a long record of criticizing judges who have ruled against Trump's executive orders or in other ways hindered the government's political agenda. Prior to returning to power recently, the president urged his followers against judges presiding over his civil and criminal trials, who were then inundated with intimidation and abuse.

Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have pointed to a increased climate of risks and coercion in the months since he re-entered the White House.

Rising Risk Data

Based on data gathered by the US Marshals Service, in 2025 through the third quarter, there were 562 incidents to 395 federal judges, giving rise to more than eight hundred investigations. This year has already surpassed the first recorded year, and last year, and is on track to exceed 2023's record of 630 reported incidents.

The dangers are not just happening at the federal level. Data from the university's research project indicates that there have been at least 59 instances of intimidation, targeting, surveillance, or physical attacks committed against judges on the local level in 2025.

Analyst Analysis on Threat Sources

Experts say that the intimidation are a product of the language coming from top government officials.

In May, the watchdog group published a detailed report claiming that “harmful and highly irresponsible statements from Trump administration members and supporters coincide with rising violent posts on social media.” It recorded “a fifty-four percent rise in demands for removal and physical intimidation against judges across digital networks from January to February 2025, the first full month of the president's term.”

Beirich, the co-founder of the organization, said: “The president's warnings against judges have certainly driven online vitriol at judges and demands for impeachment. Targeting the courts is one more step in Trump’s advance towards authoritarianism.”

Global Strongman Playbook

This progression towards authoritarianism has been common in the past decade in several countries, such as by the Salvadoran.

In several years ago, immediately after starting a second term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, Bukele’s parliamentary loyalists voted to dismiss the nation's attorney general and five justices on the constitutional court. The judges, who had provoked his ire by rejecting pandemic policies, were replaced by replacements selected by the leader.

The action mirrored Viktor Orbán’s remodeling of Hungary’s court system several years back; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and attempts at comparable actions in the Middle Eastern state and Poland.

Weakening Judicial Independence

Experts explain that the intimidation and verbal assaults in the US can be viewed as attempts to weaken judicial independence in a structure that offers no easy way for the executive to remove judges the administration opposes.

Leonard, an academic at Illinois State University who has studied democratic decline in free nations, said the Trump administration had taken cues from the examples set by authoritarians overseas.

“The administration is observing at these achievements and failures. They know they’re not going to be able to pass any laws that would undermine the courts,” she said.

Citing instances such as the advisor's relentless assertions of broad executive power, she noted: “They openly attack the judiciary by stating over and over that it is not a co-equal branch in the separation of powers.

“They continue to reframe the discussion by emphasizing their claim that the president has greater authority than this judicial branch, which is not how checks and balances work.”

The professor said: “Judges' only protection is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their capacity to make those decisions. Personal intimidation on top of eroding institutional legitimacy may make judges hesitate about decisions that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, massively problematic for judicial review and for democracy.”

Coercion Methods

Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of sociology and international affairs at the Ivy League school, has documented the use of “autocratic legalism” by the such as the Hungarian and the Russian, and has warned about escalating dangers to judges in the US.

She highlighted a series of termed “pizza doxxings” this year, in which judges have received unwanted food orders with the customer listed as a name, the son of Judge Esther Salas, who was killed at the residence in 2020 by a assailant aiming at Salas.

“All knows what it means. ‘Your address is known. You are a target,’” Scheppele said.

“Federal judges are protected by the presidential protection and the federal police. And those are both dedicated police units that are placed institutionally inside the Department of Justice. And the former AG has been leading the criticism on federal judges.”

Government Goals

Regarding the government's aims, Scheppele said that “impeaching a federal judge is almost certainly not going to happen because it’s very difficult to do. {Right now|Currently