🔗 Share this article

The US President rarely accepts advice, particularly from international figures who often attempt to praise and admire the US president.

However, the Central American nation's strongman president Nayib Bukele has followed a distinct approach by calling on the Trump administration to follow his example in removing so-called “dishonest judges.”

His appeal for the president to take action against the American court system also received support from Maga figures, including an X post by former close Trump ally Elon Musk, who has previously amplified Bukele's demands to impeach US judges.

Growing Risks to Judicial Independence

Experts note that Bukele's latest intervention come at a time of unmatched dangers to court autonomy and individual judges in the US, and during a phase where the president's team is using similar strong-arm methods employed by rulers in nations such as Türkiye, the European state, the Asian nation, and Bukele's own the Central American country to weaken democratic accountability.

The president's social media statement recently was just the latest in a long series of provocations and allegations he has made against the US's legal system, such as a spring claim that the US was “experiencing a court takeover,” and ridicule of a court's ruling to halt removal operations sending accused undocumented individuals to his country's brutal correctional facilities.

Attacks on Federal Judge

Bukele's impeachment call was also issued during social media criticism on the state's justice Judge Immergut by White House aide Miller, attorney general Pam Bondi, Musk, and the president personally in a latest media briefing.

Immergut had ordered injunctions blocking Trump from mobilizing the military reserves, first in Oregon then in the West Coast state. The president has been pushing to dispatch soldiers into Portland, which the president has characterized as “battle-scarred” based on limited, peaceful protests outside the city's homeland security facility.

Record of Attacking Judges

The advisor, the former AG, and Musk have a history of attacking judges who have blocked presidential directives or otherwise impeded the administration's political agenda. Before returning to power this year, the president urged his supporters against judges overseeing his civil and criminal trials, who were then deluged with intimidation and harassment.

Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have highlighted a heightened atmosphere of threats and coercion in the months since he re-entered the presidency.

Increasing Threat Statistics

Based on data collected by the US Marshals Service, in the current year through the third quarter, there were over five hundred threats to 395 federal judges, leading to more than eight hundred investigations. This year has already surpassed the first recorded year, and last year, and is likely to exceed the previous year's high of 630 reported incidents.

The threats are not just happening at the federal level. Data from Princeton's Bridging Divides Initiative indicates that there have been at least 59 instances of threats, harassment, stalking, or violence committed against judges on the state and municipal levels in 2025.

Expert Analysis on Root Causes

Specialists say that the intimidation are a result of the language coming from senior administration figures.

In May, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) published a comprehensive report alleging that “harmful and reckless statements from White House allies and supporters coincide with escalating violent posts on social media.” It recorded “a fifty-four percent increase in calls for impeachment and physical intimidation against judges across social media platforms from the first two months of this year, the initial period of the president's term.”

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the organization, said: “The president's threats against judges have certainly fueled online vitriol at judges and calls for impeachment. Attacking the judiciary is one more step in Trump’s advance towards strongman rule.”

International Authoritarian Playbook

This progression towards autocracy has been well-trodden in the past decade in multiple countries, such as by Bukele.

In several years ago, immediately after commencing a new term despite constitutional prohibitions, Bukele’s parliamentary loyalists voted to dismiss the nation's attorney general and several justices on the supreme court. The judges, who had provoked his ire by rejecting pandemic policies, were replaced by new appointees selected by the leader.

The action mirrored the Hungarian leader's remodeling of Hungary’s court system several years back; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and efforts at comparable actions in Israel and Poland.

Weakening Court Autonomy

Analysts say that the threats and verbal assaults in the US can be viewed as attempts to undermine judicial independence in a structure that provides no simple method for the executive to dismiss judges Trump disapproves of.

Meghan Leonard, an associate professor at the university who has researched authoritarian backsliding in democracies, said the Trump administration had taken cues from the examples set by strongmen overseas.

“The government is observing at these successes and setbacks. They know they’re not going to be able to pass any laws that would weaken the judiciary,” she said.

Pointing to examples such as the advisor's persistent assertions of broad executive power, she noted: “They directly criticize the courts by stating over and over that it is not a co-equal branch in the separation of powers.

“They continue to reframe the debate by emphasizing their argument that the executive has greater authority than this other co-equal branch, which is not how checks and balances work.”

Leonard said: “Judges' only protection is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their ability to make those rulings. Individual threats on top of weakening institutional legitimacy may make judges think twice about decisions that go against the current administration, which is, of course, massively problematic for judicial review and for democracy.”

Coercion Methods

Kim Lane Scheppele, academic of social science and global studies at the Ivy League school, has written about the use of “authoritarian law” by the likes of the Hungarian and Putin, and has spoken out about rising dangers to judges in the US.

She pointed to a series of so-called “harassment deliveries” this year, in which judges have received unwanted pizza deliveries with the recipient listed as Daniel Anderl, the son of Justice Salas, who was killed at the residence in 2020 by a assailant aiming at the judge.

“All knows what it means. ‘We know where you live. We’re coming for you,’” the professor said.

“Federal judges are guarded by the Secret Service and the federal police. And those are both specialized police units that sit structurally inside the federal agency. And Pam Bondi has been spearheading the attacks on federal judges.”

Administration Aims

On the government's aims, Scheppele said that “impeaching a US justice is almost certainly not going to happen because it’s so hard to do. {Right now|Currently