Donald Trump does not usually take counsel, especially from foreign leaders who frequently seek to flatter and compliment the US president.
However, the Central American nation's strongman president Bukele has followed a different approach by urging the Trump administration to follow his example in removing so-called “dishonest judges.”
His appeal for Trump to move against the American court system also garnered backing from Maga figures, such as an X post by former close Trump ally the billionaire, who has in the past amplified the Salvadoran's demands to oust US judges.
Experts say that the leader's recent intervention come at a time of unmatched threats to court autonomy and specific justices in the United States, and during a phase where the Trump administration is employing comparable strong-arm methods used by leaders in nations such as Türkiye, Hungary, India, and his native El Salvador to undermine democratic accountability.
The president's online statement last week was just the latest in a long series of provocations and allegations he has leveled against the US's legal system, including a spring assertion that the US was “facing a court takeover,” and his mockery of a court's order to stop deportation flights sending accused undocumented individuals to his nation's brutal prison system.
The Salvadoran's demand for removal was also issued amid online attacks on Oregon justice Judge Immergut by presidential advisor Miller, former AG Pam Bondi, Musk, and Trump himself in a recent press gaggle.
Immergut had ordered restraining orders preventing the administration from deploying the national guard, initially in the state then in the West Coast state. The president has been eager to dispatch troops into the city, which the leader has characterized as “war-ravaged” based on limited, non-violent protests outside the city's homeland security facility.
The advisor, Bondi, and Musk have a long record of criticizing judges who have blocked Trump's executive orders or otherwise impeded the government's political agenda. Before returning to power this year, Trump urged his supporters against judges overseeing his legal cases, who were then inundated with intimidation and harassment.
Watchdog organizations, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have highlighted a increased atmosphere of risks and intimidation in the period since he returned to the White House.
Based on information collected by the US Marshals Service, in the current year through the third quarter, there were over five hundred threats to nearly four hundred US justices, leading to 805 inquiries. 2025 has already surpassed the first recorded year, and 2024, and is likely to exceed the previous year's record of 630 threats.
The threats are not only happening at the national level. Information by the university's Bridging Divides Initiative shows that there have been at least fifty-nine cases of intimidation, targeting, surveillance, or violence directed against judges on the state and municipal levels in the current year.
Experts state that the intimidation are a result of the language coming from top government officials.
In spring, the watchdog group published a comprehensive report claiming that “malicious and reckless statements from Trump administration members and allies align with escalating violent posts on social media.” It noted “a fifty-four percent rise in demands for impeachment and physical intimidation against judges across social media platforms from the first two months 2025, the initial period of Trump’s administration.”
Beirich, the co-founder of the organization, said: “The president's threats against judges have definitely driven online vitriol at judges and calls for impeachment. Targeting the judiciary is one more step in Trump’s advance towards strongman rule.”
This progression towards autocracy has been common in the past decade in several nations, such as by the Salvadoran.
In 2021, immediately after commencing a second term in the face of legal bans, the president's parliamentary loyalists voted to dismiss the nation's attorney general and five justices on the constitutional court. The justices, who had provoked his ire by ruling against pandemic policies, were replaced by new appointees selected by the leader.
The action echoed Viktor Orbán’s overhaul of Hungary’s court system in 2018; the Turkish president's court cleanups in 2019; 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 attempts to weaken court autonomy in a system that provides no simple method for the executive to remove judges Trump opposes.
Meghan Leonard, an academic at the university who has studied democratic decline in free nations, said the White House had taken cues from the examples set by strongmen abroad.
“The administration is looking around at these successes and failures. 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 the advisor's persistent claims of broad executive power, she noted: “They directly attack the courts by stating repeatedly that it is not a equal branch in the separation of powers.
“They persist in reframe the discussion by repeating their claim that the executive has greater authority than this other co-equal branch, which is not how checks and balances work.”
The professor said: “Justices' sole safeguard is public trust in the authority of their capacity to make those decisions. Individual threats on top of eroding trust in courts may make judges hesitate about judgments that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, highly concerning for court oversight and for democracy.”
Scheppele, professor of social science and global studies at Princeton University, has written about the use of “authoritarian law” by the such as Orbán and Putin, and has spoken out about rising threats to judges in the US.
She highlighted a wave of termed “harassment deliveries” recently, in which judges have received unwanted food orders with the recipient listed as a name, the son of Judge Esther Salas, who was murdered at the judge’s home in 2020 by a assailant aiming at Salas.
“All understands what it means. ‘We know where you live. You are a target,’” Scheppele said.
“Federal judges are guarded by the presidential protection and the Marshals Service. And those are both dedicated law enforcement that are placed structurally inside the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi has been spearheading the criticism on justices.”
Regarding the administration’s aims, the expert said that “removing a federal judge is almost certainly not going to happen because it’s so hard to do. {Right now|Currently
