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Donald Trump rarely accepts guidance, particularly from foreign leaders who frequently seek to flatter and compliment the US president.

However, the Central American nation's authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele has followed a distinct strategy by calling on the White House to emulate his actions in impeaching so-called “dishonest judges.”

The call for the president to move against the American court system also garnered backing from Maga figures, including an X post by one-time supporter Elon Musk, who has in the past boosted Bukele's demands to oust US judges.

Unprecedented Threats to Judicial Independence

Experts say that the leader's latest remarks come at a time of unmatched dangers to judicial independence and individual judges in the US, and during a phase where the president's team is employing comparable strong-arm tactics used by leaders in nations such as Türkiye, Hungary, India, and Bukele's own the Central American country to weaken democratic accountability.

Bukele's online statement recently was just the latest in a long series of provocations and claims he has made against the US's legal system, including a spring assertion that the US was “experiencing a court takeover,” and his mockery of a federal judge's order to stop removal operations sending accused illegal immigrants to his country's brutal prison system.

Attacks on Federal Judge

The Salvadoran's demand for removal was also issued amid online attacks on the state's federal judge Judge Immergut by presidential advisor Stephen Miller, attorney general Pam Bondi, Musk, and the president personally in a latest press gaggle.

The judge had ordered injunctions blocking Trump from deploying the national guard, initially in Oregon then in the West Coast state. Trump has been pushing to send troops into the city, which the leader has described as “war-ravaged” based on limited, peaceful demonstrations outside the city's homeland security facility.

History of Attacking Justices

Miller, the former AG, and Musk have a long record of criticizing judges who have ruled against Trump's executive orders or otherwise hindered the administration's policy goals. Prior to returning to power this year, the president urged his followers against judges presiding over his civil and criminal trials, who were then inundated with intimidation and harassment.

Monitoring groups, police departments, and judges themselves have pointed to a increased climate of threats and intimidation in the period since he returned to the White House.

Increasing Threat Statistics

According to data gathered by the federal agency, in the current year through the end of September, there were 562 threats to 395 federal judges, leading to 805 investigations. 2025 has already eclipsed 2022, and 2024, and is on track to top the previous year's high of over six hundred reported incidents.

The threats are not only happening at the national level. Information by Princeton's research project indicates that there have been at least fifty-nine instances of threats, targeting, surveillance, or violence committed against judges on the state and municipal levels in 2025.

Expert Insights on Threat Sources

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

In spring, the watchdog group published a detailed report alleging that “malicious and reckless statements from Trump administration members and supporters coincide with escalating violent posts on social media.” It noted “a fifty-four percent increase in calls for removal and physical intimidation against judges across digital networks from the first two months of this year, the first full month of Trump’s administration.”

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the organization, said: “The president's threats against judges have certainly fueled digital abuse at judges and demands for ouster. Attacking the judiciary is one more step in Trump’s march towards authoritarianism.”

International Strongman Tactics

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

In several years ago, immediately after starting a second term despite constitutional prohibitions, the president's allies in congress voted to dismiss the nation's top prosecutor and five 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 mirrored the Hungarian leader's overhaul of the nation's judiciary in 2018; the Turkish president's court cleanups in 2019; and attempts at comparable actions in the Middle Eastern state and Poland.

Undermining Judicial Independence

Analysts explain that the intimidation and rhetorical attacks in the US can be viewed as efforts to weaken court autonomy in a system that provides no simple method for the president to dismiss judges Trump opposes.

Meghan Leonard, an academic at Illinois State University who has researched authoritarian backsliding in democracies, said the White House had learned from the models set by authoritarians overseas.

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

Pointing to examples such as Miller’s persistent claims of nearly limitless presidential authority, she noted: “They directly criticize the courts by stating repeatedly that it is not a co-equal branch in the government structure.

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

The professor said: “Judges' sole safeguard is public trust in the authority of their ability to make those rulings. Individual threats on top of eroding trust in courts may make judges think twice about decisions that go against the current administration, which is, of course, massively problematic for court oversight and for democracy.”

Coercion Methods

Scheppele, academic of sociology and global studies at the Ivy League school, has documented the use of “authoritarian law” by the likes of the Hungarian and the Russian, and has spoken out about rising dangers to judges in the US.

She pointed to a series of termed “pizza doxxings” recently, in which judges have received unsolicited food orders with the customer listed as a name, the son of Judge Esther 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,’” Scheppele said.

“US justices are guarded by the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. And those are both dedicated law enforcement that are placed institutionally inside the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi has been spearheading the criticism on federal judges.”

Administration Aims

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