🔗 Share this article

The US President is not typically known for counsel, especially from international figures who often seek to flatter and admire the US president.

However, the Central American nation's authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele has followed a different approach by calling on the White House to follow his example in impeaching what he terms “corrupt judges.”

The call for Trump to take action against the American court system also received backing from Trump allies, including an social media message by one-time supporter the billionaire, who has in the past amplified Bukele's calls to oust US judges.

Unprecedented Risks to Judicial Independence

Analysts note that Bukele's recent remarks come at a time of unprecedented dangers to judicial independence and specific justices in the United States, and during a period where the Trump administration is using comparable strong-arm methods employed by rulers in countries such as Türkiye, the European state, India, and his native the Central American country to weaken government oversight.

The president's online statement last week was just the latest in a long series of taunts and allegations he has made against the American judiciary, including a March assertion that the US was “experiencing a court takeover,” and ridicule of a court's ruling to stop removal operations transporting suspected undocumented individuals to his country's harsh correctional facilities.

Criticism on Oregon Justice

The Salvadoran's impeachment call was also issued amid online attacks on Oregon justice Karin Immergut by presidential advisor Stephen Miller, attorney general Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, and Trump personally in a recent press gaggle.

The judge had issued injunctions blocking the administration from mobilizing the national guard, first in the state then in California. The president has been eager to dispatch soldiers into Portland, which the leader has characterized as “war-ravaged” based on small, peaceful protests outside the city's homeland security facility.

History of Targeting Justices

The advisor, Bondi, and the entrepreneur have a long record of attacking judges who have blocked Trump's executive orders or otherwise impeded the administration's political agenda. Before resuming office recently, Trump directed his supporters against judges overseeing his civil and criminal trials, who were then inundated with threats and harassment.

Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have pointed to a increased atmosphere of threats and intimidation in the months since he returned to the presidency.

Increasing Risk Data

According to information collected by the federal agency, in 2025 through the third quarter, there were over five hundred threats to nearly four hundred US justices, giving rise to 805 investigations. This year has already surpassed 2022, and last year, and is likely to exceed the previous year's record of over six hundred threats.

The dangers are not only happening at the federal level. Data from the university's Bridging Divides Initiative indicates that there have been at least fifty-nine instances of threats, targeting, stalking, or physical attacks directed against judges on the state and municipal levels in the current year.

Expert Insights on Threat Sources

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

In May, the watchdog group published a comprehensive report claiming that “malicious and reckless statements from White House allies and supporters coincide with escalating aggressive posts on online platforms.” It recorded “a fifty-four percent rise in calls for impeachment and violent threats against judges across social media platforms from January to February 2025, the initial period of Trump’s administration.”

Beirich, the co-founder of GPAHE, said: “Trump’s threats against judges have definitely driven digital abuse at judges and demands for impeachment. Targeting the courts is another move in Trump’s march towards authoritarianism.”

Global Strongman Playbook

This progression towards autocracy has been common in the past decade in multiple nations, such as by the Salvadoran.

In 2021, immediately after starting a second term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, Bukele’s parliamentary loyalists voted to remove the nation's attorney general and several justices on the supreme court. The judges, who had provoked his ire by ruling against pandemic policies, were replaced by new appointees hand picked by the leader.

The action echoed the Hungarian leader's remodeling of Hungary’s court system in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges recently; and efforts at comparable actions in the Middle Eastern state and the European country.

Undermining Judicial Independence

Experts say that the intimidation and rhetorical attacks in the US can be seen as attempts to undermine court autonomy in a structure that provides no simple method for the president to remove judges Trump disapproves of.

Meghan Leonard, an academic at the university who has researched democratic decline in democracies, said the White House had taken cues from the examples set by authoritarians abroad.

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

Pointing to examples such as the advisor's persistent claims of broad presidential authority, she noted: “They directly criticize the courts by repeating repeatedly that it is not a co-equal branch in the separation of powers.

“They persist in reframe the debate by repeating their argument 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 authority of their capacity to make those decisions. Personal intimidation on top of weakening trust in courts may make judges hesitate about judgments that go against the current administration, which is, of course, highly concerning for court oversight and for the political system.”

Coercion Methods

Kim Lane Scheppele, academic of sociology and international affairs at the Ivy League school, has written about the use of “autocratic legalism” by the likes of Orbán and the Russian, and has spoken out about escalating threats to judges in the US.

She pointed to a series of termed “pizza doxxings” recently, in which judges have received unsolicited pizza deliveries with the customer listed as a name, the child of Justice Salas, who was murdered at the residence in several years ago by a assailant aiming at Salas.

“Everyone understands what it means. ‘Your address is known. You are a target,’” the professor said.

“US justices are protected by the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. And those are both dedicated police units that are placed institutionally inside the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi has been spearheading the attacks on federal judges.”

Government Goals

On the administration’s objectives, Scheppele said that “removing a federal judge is highly not going to happen because it’s very difficult to do. {Right now|Currently