Donald Trump does not usually take guidance, especially from foreign leaders who frequently seek to praise and compliment the American leader.
But, El Salvador's strongman president Nayib Bukele has adopted a different approach by urging the Trump administration to emulate his actions in removing so-called “corrupt judges.”
The call for Trump to take action against the American court system also received support from Trump allies, such as an X post by former supporter the billionaire, who has in the past boosted Bukele's calls to oust US judges.
Experts say that the leader's recent remarks come at a time of unmatched threats to court autonomy and specific justices in the US, and during a period where the Trump administration is using comparable authoritarian methods used by rulers in countries such as Türkiye, Hungary, the Asian nation, and Bukele's own El Salvador to weaken government oversight.
The president's social media call last week was just the latest in a string of provocations and allegations he has leveled against the American judiciary, including a spring claim that the US was “experiencing a court takeover,” and his mockery of a federal judge's order to stop deportation flights transporting accused undocumented individuals to his country's brutal correctional facilities.
Bukele's impeachment call was also issued during social media attacks on Oregon federal judge Karin Immergut by White House aide Miller, former AG Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, and the president personally in a recent media briefing.
The judge had ordered injunctions blocking Trump from mobilizing the military reserves, initially in the state then in the West Coast state. Trump has been eager to dispatch soldiers into the city, which the leader has characterized as “battle-scarred” based on small, peaceful demonstrations outside the urban federal building.
The advisor, the former AG, and Musk have a long record of criticizing judges who have ruled against presidential directives or otherwise impeded the administration's policy goals. Before resuming office recently, the president urged his followers against judges overseeing his civil and criminal trials, who were then deluged with threats and abuse.
Watchdog organizations, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have pointed to a heightened climate of risks and coercion in the months since he returned to the presidency.
Based on data collected by the US Marshals Service, in the current year through the end of September, 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 on track to top 2023's record of 630 threats.
The threats are not only happening at the federal level. Information by the university's Bridging Divides Initiative indicates that there have been at least 59 cases of intimidation, targeting, surveillance, or violence committed against judges on the local level in the current year.
Experts say that the intimidation are a product of the language coming from top government officials.
In spring, the watchdog group published a detailed report claiming that “harmful and highly irresponsible statements from White House allies and supporters coincide with rising aggressive posts on social media.” It noted “a 54% increase in calls for removal and violent threats against judges across digital networks from January to February 2025, the first full month of the president's term.”
Heidi Beirich, the founder of the organization, said: “The president's warnings against judges have definitely fueled digital abuse at judges and calls for impeachment. Targeting the courts is one more step in Trump’s advance towards strongman rule.”
This progression towards autocracy has been well-trodden in the past decade in multiple countries, such as by Bukele.
In several years ago, right after commencing a new term despite legal bans, the president's parliamentary loyalists voted to dismiss the country’s top prosecutor and five judges on the supreme court. The judges, who had angered him by ruling against pandemic policies, were replaced by replacements hand picked by Bukele.
The move echoed Viktor Orbán’s remodeling of Hungary’s court system in 2018; the Turkish president's judicial purges recently; and attempts at comparable actions in the Middle Eastern state and Poland.
Experts explain that the threats and rhetorical attacks in the US can be seen as efforts to undermine court autonomy in a structure that provides no simple method for the executive to dismiss judges Trump disapproves of.
Leonard, an associate professor at the university who has researched authoritarian backsliding in free nations, said the White House had taken cues from the models set by authoritarians abroad.
“The administration is looking around at these successes and setbacks. They know they’re not going to be able to enact any laws that would undermine the courts,” she said.
Pointing to instances such as Miller’s persistent assertions of nearly limitless presidential authority, she added: “They openly criticize the judiciary by repeating repeatedly that it is not a equal branch in the separation of powers.
“They persist in reframe the debate by repeating their claim that the president has more power than this other co-equal branch, which is not how separation powers work.”
The professor said: “Judges' sole safeguard is public trust in the authority of their capacity to make those decisions. Personal intimidation on top of weakening institutional legitimacy may make judges hesitate about decisions that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, massively problematic for court oversight and for democracy.”
Kim Lane Scheppele, academic of sociology and international affairs at the Ivy League school, has written about the use of “authoritarian law” by the likes of Orbán and the Russian, and has warned about escalating threats to judges in the US.
She pointed to a wave of termed “harassment deliveries” recently, in which judges have received unsolicited food orders with the customer listed as Daniel Anderl, the child of Justice Salas, who was killed at the residence in 2020 by a gunman targeting Salas.
“All knows what it means. ‘We know where you live. We’re coming for you,’” the professor said.
“US justices are guarded by the Secret Service and the federal police. And those are both specialized law enforcement that sit institutionally inside the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi has been leading the attacks on federal judges.”
Regarding the government's objectives, Scheppele said that “impeaching a US justice is highly not going to happen because it’s very difficult to do. {Right now|Currently
