🔗 Share this article

The US President does not usually take advice, particularly from foreign leaders who frequently seek to flatter and admire the US president.

However, El Salvador's authoritarian leader Bukele has followed a distinct strategy by calling on the Trump administration to follow his example in impeaching so-called “dishonest judges.”

His appeal for Trump to take action against the American court system also garnered backing from Trump allies, such as an X post by former supporter Elon Musk, who has previously boosted Bukele's calls to oust US judges.

Unprecedented Risks to Judicial Independence

Analysts say that the leader's recent remarks come at a time of unmatched dangers to court autonomy and individual judges in the United States, and during a period where the president's team is using similar authoritarian methods used by rulers in nations such as Turkey, Hungary, India, and his native El Salvador to weaken government oversight.

The president's online call recently was one more in a string of provocations and claims he has made against the American judiciary, such as a spring assertion that the US was “experiencing a court takeover,” and ridicule of a federal judge's order to halt deportation flights transporting suspected undocumented individuals to his country's brutal prison system.

Criticism on Oregon Justice

Bukele's demand for removal was also issued amid online criticism on Oregon federal judge Karin Immergut by presidential advisor Miller, attorney general Bondi, Musk, and the president himself in a latest media briefing.

Immergut had issued restraining orders blocking Trump from mobilizing the military reserves, first in Oregon then in the West Coast state. The president has been pushing to send troops into Portland, which the president has described as “war-ravaged” based on small, non-violent protests outside the city's federal building.

History of Attacking Justices

Miller, the former AG, and Musk have a long record of criticizing judges who have ruled against presidential directives or otherwise impeded the administration's political agenda. Prior to resuming office recently, the president directed his supporters against judges overseeing his legal cases, who were then inundated with intimidation and harassment.

Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies, and the justices have pointed to a increased atmosphere of risks and coercion in the period since he re-entered the presidency.

Increasing Risk Data

Based on information gathered by the federal agency, in 2025 through the end of September, there were 562 threats to nearly four hundred federal judges, giving rise to 805 investigations. This year has already surpassed the first recorded year, and 2024, and is on track to exceed 2023's high of over six hundred reported incidents.

The dangers are not just happening at the national level. Data from Princeton's research project shows that there have been at least 59 instances of threats, harassment, stalking, or violence committed against judges on the local level in 2025.

Expert Analysis on Root Causes

Specialists say that the intimidation are a result of the rhetoric coming from top government officials.

In spring, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) published a detailed report claiming that “malicious and reckless statements from Trump administration members and supporters coincide with escalating aggressive posts on social media.” It noted “a 54% rise in calls for impeachment and violent threats against judges across social media platforms from the first two months of this year, the initial period of the president's term.”

Beirich, the founder of GPAHE, said: “The president's threats against judges have definitely driven digital abuse at judges and calls for impeachment. Attacking the judiciary is one more step in Trump’s advance towards authoritarianism.”

Global Strongman Playbook

That march towards autocracy has been common in recent years in multiple nations, such as by Bukele.

In several years ago, immediately after starting a new term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, Bukele’s parliamentary loyalists voted to remove the nation's top prosecutor and five judges on the constitutional court. The justices, 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 the nation's judiciary in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and attempts at comparable actions in Israel and the European country.

Weakening Court Autonomy

Experts explain that the intimidation and rhetorical attacks in the US can be viewed as efforts to undermine court autonomy in a structure that offers no easy way for the president to remove judges the administration opposes.

Meghan Leonard, an academic at Illinois State University who has studied democratic decline in democracies, said the Trump administration had learned from the models set by authoritarians overseas.

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

Pointing to instances such as Miller’s relentless assertions of broad executive power, she noted: “They openly criticize the courts by stating over and over that it is not a co-equal branch in the separation of powers.

“They continue to redefine the debate by emphasizing their claim that the president has more power than this judicial branch, which is not how checks and balances work.”

Leonard said: “Judges' sole safeguard is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their ability to make those rulings. Individual threats on top of eroding institutional legitimacy may make judges think twice about decisions that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, massively problematic for court oversight and for democracy.”

Intimidation Tactics

Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of social science and international affairs at the Ivy League school, has written about the use of “autocratic legalism” by the such as Orbán and the Russian, and has spoken out about escalating dangers to judges in the US.

She pointed to a wave of so-called “harassment deliveries” recently, in which judges have received unsolicited pizza deliveries with the recipient listed as a name, the child of Justice Salas, who was killed at the judge’s home in 2020 by a assailant targeting the judge.

“All knows what it means. ‘Your address is known. We’re coming for you,’” the professor said.

“US justices are protected by the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. And those are both dedicated police units that sit structurally inside the federal agency. And Pam Bondi has been leading the attacks on justices.”

Government Goals

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