The US President is not typically known for advice, particularly from international figures who frequently seek to praise and admire the US president.
But, El Salvador's strongman president Nayib Bukele has followed a distinct approach by urging the Trump administration to emulate his actions in removing what he terms “corrupt judges.”
His appeal for Trump to take action against the US judiciary also received backing from Trump allies, including an social media message by former close Trump ally Elon Musk, who has in the past boosted Bukele's calls to impeach US judges.
Analysts note that Bukele's latest remarks occur of unprecedented threats to court autonomy and specific justices in the US, and during a phase where the Trump administration is employing comparable strong-arm methods employed by leaders in nations such as Türkiye, the European state, the Asian nation, and Bukele's own El Salvador to undermine democratic accountability.
The president's online call recently was just the latest in a long series of provocations and allegations he has made against the US's legal system, such as a spring claim that the US was “facing a court takeover,” and ridicule of a federal judge's ruling to stop removal operations transporting accused undocumented individuals to his nation's brutal correctional facilities.
The Salvadoran's demand for removal was also made amid social media criticism on the state's justice Karin Immergut by White House aide Miller, attorney general Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, and the president himself in a recent press gaggle.
The judge had issued injunctions preventing the administration from deploying the military reserves, initially in Oregon then in the West Coast state. Trump has been eager to dispatch soldiers into the city, which the leader has described as “war-ravaged” based on small, peaceful demonstrations outside the city's federal building.
The advisor, the former AG, and the entrepreneur have a long record of criticizing judges who have ruled against presidential directives or in other ways impeded the government's policy goals. Before resuming office recently, the president directed his supporters against judges presiding over his legal cases, who were then deluged with threats and abuse.
Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have pointed to a increased climate of threats and intimidation in the period since he returned to the White House.
According to data collected by the federal agency, in 2025 through the end of September, there were over five hundred threats to 395 federal judges, leading to more than eight hundred inquiries. 2025 has already eclipsed the first recorded year, and last year, and is on track to top 2023's high of over six hundred reported incidents.
The threats are not just happening at the federal level. Data from Princeton's Bridging Divides Initiative indicates that there have been at least 59 cases of threats, harassment, surveillance, or violence committed against judges on the state and municipal levels in the current year.
Specialists state that the intimidation are a product of the rhetoric coming from top government officials.
In spring, the watchdog group published a comprehensive report claiming that “malicious and highly irresponsible statements from Trump administration members and supporters align 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 of this year, the first full month of Trump’s administration.”
Beirich, the founder of GPAHE, said: “The president's threats against judges have certainly fueled digital abuse at judges and calls for impeachment. Targeting the courts is one more step in Trump’s advance towards authoritarianism.”
That march towards autocracy has been common in the past decade in several countries, such as by Bukele.
In several years ago, right after starting a new term despite legal bans, the president's allies in congress voted to dismiss the nation's attorney general and five judges on the supreme court. The justices, who had angered him by rejecting coronavirus measures, made way for replacements selected by the leader.
The move echoed the Hungarian leader's remodeling of Hungary’s court system several years back; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges recently; and attempts at comparable actions in Israel and the European country.
Analysts say that the intimidation and rhetorical attacks in the US can be seen as efforts to undermine court autonomy in a system that provides no simple method for the executive to dismiss judges Trump disapproves of.
Meghan Leonard, an associate professor at Illinois State University who has researched democratic decline in democracies, said the Trump administration had taken cues from the models set by authoritarians abroad.
“The government is looking around at these achievements and failures. They know they’re not going to be able to pass any legislation that would undermine the courts,” she said.
Pointing to instances such as Miller’s relentless assertions of broad executive power, she noted: “They directly attack the courts by repeating repeatedly that it is not a co-equal branch in the government structure.
“They continue to reframe the debate by repeating their argument that the president has more power than this other co-equal branch, which is not how separation powers work.”
The professor said: “Justices' only protection is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their ability to make those decisions. Individual threats on top of eroding trust in courts may make judges think twice about judgments that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, massively problematic for court oversight and for the political system.”
Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of sociology and international affairs at the Ivy League school, has written about the use of “authoritarian law” by the such as Orbán and Putin, and has spoken out about escalating dangers to judges in the US.
She highlighted a series of so-called “harassment deliveries” this year, in which judges have received unwanted food orders with the customer listed as a name, the son of Judge Esther Salas, who was murdered at the judge’s home in several years ago by a assailant targeting Salas.
“Everyone knows what it means. ‘We know where you live. We’re coming for you,’” the professor said.
“Federal judges are guarded by the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. And those are both dedicated law enforcement that sit structurally inside the federal agency. And the former AG has been spearheading the attacks on justices.”
Regarding the government's objectives, Scheppele said that “impeaching a federal judge is highly not going to happen because it’s so hard to do. {Right now|Currently
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