🔗 Share this article

Donald Trump is not typically known for advice, particularly from foreign leaders who frequently seek to flatter and admire the American leader.

However, the Central American nation's strongman president Bukele has followed a distinct approach by urging the White House to emulate his actions in removing so-called “corrupt judges.”

The call for the president to take action against the US judiciary also received support from Maga figures, such as an X post by one-time supporter the billionaire, who has in the past boosted the Salvadoran's demands to impeach US judges.

Growing Risks to Judicial Independence

Experts say that the leader's recent intervention occur of unmatched threats to judicial independence and specific justices in the US, and during a period where the Trump administration is employing similar strong-arm tactics employed by rulers in countries such as Turkey, the European state, the Asian nation, and his native the Central American country to weaken government oversight.

The president's social media call recently was one more in a long series of provocations and claims he has leveled against the US's legal system, such as a spring assertion that the US was “experiencing a judicial coup,” and his mockery of a federal judge's order to halt removal operations transporting suspected undocumented individuals to his country's brutal prison system.

Attacks on Federal Judge

The Salvadoran's demand for removal was also issued amid online attacks on Oregon federal judge Karin Immergut by presidential advisor Miller, former AG Bondi, Elon Musk, and the president personally in a recent media briefing.

Immergut had issued restraining orders blocking the administration from mobilizing the military reserves, first in Oregon then in the West Coast state. Trump has been eager to dispatch soldiers into the city, which the president has characterized as “battle-scarred” based on small, non-violent demonstrations outside the city's homeland security facility.

History of Targeting Judges

Miller, Bondi, and Musk have a long record of criticizing judges who have blocked Trump's executive orders or otherwise impeded the administration's political agenda. Before returning to power recently, Trump urged his followers against judges presiding over his civil and criminal trials, who were then deluged with threats and harassment.

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

Rising Risk Data

Based on data collected by the federal agency, in the current year through the end of September, there were 562 threats to nearly four hundred federal judges, leading to more than eight hundred inquiries. This year has already surpassed the first recorded year, and last year, and is likely to top 2023's record of over six hundred reported incidents.

The dangers are not only happening at the federal level. Data from the university's Bridging Divides Initiative shows that there have been at least 59 cases of intimidation, targeting, surveillance, or violence directed against judges on the state and municipal levels in 2025.

Expert Analysis on Root Causes

Specialists state that the intimidation are a result of the language coming from top government officials.

In spring, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) published a detailed report claiming that “harmful and reckless statements from White House allies and supporters coincide with escalating violent posts on online platforms.” It recorded “a 54% increase in demands for removal and physical intimidation against judges across social media platforms from the first two months 2025, the first full month of Trump’s administration.”

Heidi Beirich, the founder of the organization, said: “The president's threats against judges have certainly fueled online vitriol at judges and demands for ouster. Attacking the judiciary is another move in the administration's advance towards strongman rule.”

Global Authoritarian Playbook

That march towards authoritarianism has been well-trodden in the past decade in multiple countries, such as by Bukele.

In 2021, immediately after starting a second term in the face of legal bans, the president's parliamentary loyalists voted to remove the country’s top prosecutor and five judges on the supreme court. The judges, who had angered him by ruling against coronavirus measures, made way for replacements hand picked by the leader.

The move mirrored Viktor Orbán’s overhaul 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 the European country.

Weakening Judicial Independence

Experts explain that the threats and rhetorical attacks in the US can be viewed as attempts to undermine judicial independence in a structure that offers no easy way for the executive to remove judges the administration opposes.

Leonard, an associate professor at Illinois State University who has researched democratic decline in democracies, said the White House had taken cues from the models set by strongmen overseas.

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

Pointing to examples such as Miller’s relentless claims of broad presidential authority, she added: “They directly criticize the courts by repeating repeatedly that it is not a equal branch in the separation of powers.

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

The professor said: “Judges' sole safeguard is public trust in the legitimacy of their capacity to make those decisions. Individual threats on top of weakening institutional legitimacy may make judges think twice about judgments that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, highly concerning for judicial review and for the political system.”

Intimidation Tactics

Kim Lane Scheppele, academic of sociology and international affairs at the Ivy League school, has documented the use of “authoritarian law” by the likes of Orbán and Putin, and has spoken out about escalating dangers to judges in the US.

She highlighted a wave of termed “pizza doxxings” recently, in which judges have received unsolicited food orders with the recipient listed as Daniel Anderl, the child of Justice Salas, who was killed at the residence in 2020 by a gunman targeting the judge.

“Everyone understands what it means. ‘We know where you live. You are a target,’” the professor said.

“Federal judges are protected by the presidential protection and the federal police. And these are dedicated law enforcement that sit institutionally inside the federal agency. And Pam Bondi has been spearheading the criticism on federal judges.”

Administration Aims

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