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The US President rarely accepts advice, particularly from international figures who frequently seek to praise and admire the US president.

But, the Central American nation's strongman president Nayib Bukele has adopted a different strategy by urging the Trump administration to emulate his actions in removing what he terms “corrupt judges.”

The call for the president to take action against the US judiciary also garnered support from Trump allies, including an social media message by former supporter Elon Musk, who has in the past amplified the Salvadoran's demands to oust US judges.

Unprecedented Threats to Court Autonomy

Experts note that Bukele's recent intervention occur of unmatched dangers to judicial independence and individual judges in the US, and during a period where the Trump administration is using similar authoritarian methods used by leaders in nations such as Turkey, Hungary, the Asian nation, and his native El Salvador to weaken government oversight.

Bukele's social media statement last week was one more in a long series of provocations and claims he has made against the US's legal system, including a March assertion that the US was “facing a court takeover,” and his mockery of a court's ruling to halt removal operations transporting suspected illegal immigrants to his nation's brutal correctional facilities.

Attacks on Oregon Justice

Bukele's demand for removal was also made amid social media attacks on Oregon federal judge Judge Immergut by presidential advisor Stephen Miller, former AG Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, and the president himself in a recent press gaggle.

Immergut had ordered restraining orders blocking the administration from deploying the military reserves, initially in the state then in the West Coast state. Trump has been eager to dispatch soldiers into Portland, which the leader has described as “war-ravaged” based on limited, non-violent demonstrations outside the city's federal building.

History of Targeting Judges

Miller, Bondi, and Musk have a long record of attacking judges who have ruled against presidential directives or in other ways hindered the administration's policy goals. Before returning to power this year, the president urged his supporters against judges overseeing his civil and criminal trials, who were then inundated with intimidation and abuse.

Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have pointed to a heightened climate of threats and coercion in the months since he re-entered the presidency.

Rising Threat Statistics

Based on information collected by the US Marshals Service, in 2025 through the end of September, there were over five hundred incidents to 395 federal judges, giving rise to 805 inquiries. This year has already eclipsed the first recorded year, and last year, and is on track to top 2023's record of 630 reported incidents.

The threats are not only happening at the national level. Data from Princeton's Bridging Divides Initiative shows that there have been at least fifty-nine instances of intimidation, harassment, surveillance, or violence committed against judges on the state and municipal levels in 2025.

Expert Analysis on Root Causes

Specialists say that the intimidation are a product of the language coming from senior administration figures.

In spring, the watchdog group published a comprehensive report claiming that “harmful and highly irresponsible statements from White House allies and allies coincide with escalating aggressive posts on online platforms.” It recorded “a fifty-four percent rise in demands for impeachment and physical intimidation against judges across digital networks from January to February 2025, the initial period of the president's term.”

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of GPAHE, said: “The president's threats against judges have definitely driven online vitriol at judges and demands for impeachment. Attacking the judiciary is another move in the administration's march towards strongman rule.”

Global Authoritarian Tactics

That march towards autocracy has been common in the past decade in multiple nations, including by Bukele.

In 2021, right after starting a second term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, Bukele’s allies in congress voted to remove the nation's attorney general and several justices on the constitutional court. The judges, who had angered him by rejecting pandemic policies, were replaced by replacements hand picked by the leader.

The action mirrored Viktor Orbán’s remodeling of Hungary’s court system several years back; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and efforts at similar moves in Israel and the European country.

Undermining Court Autonomy

Analysts say that the intimidation and verbal assaults in the US can be viewed as efforts to weaken judicial independence in a structure that provides no simple method for the executive to remove judges Trump opposes.

Meghan Leonard, an academic at the university who has studied authoritarian backsliding in free nations, said the White House had taken cues from the examples set by strongmen abroad.

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

Citing instances such as the advisor's relentless assertions of broad presidential authority, she added: “They openly criticize the courts by stating repeatedly that it is not a equal branch in the separation of powers.

“They continue to reframe the discussion by emphasizing their argument that the executive has more power than this other co-equal branch, which is not how separation powers work.”

Leonard said: “Justices' only protection is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their ability to make those decisions. Individual threats on top of eroding institutional legitimacy may make judges hesitate about decisions that go against the current administration, which is, of course, highly concerning for court oversight and for the political system.”

Intimidation Tactics

Scheppele, academic of social science 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 threats to judges in the US.

She pointed to a wave of so-called “harassment deliveries” this year, in which judges have received unwanted pizza deliveries with the customer listed as a name, the son of Justice Salas, who was murdered at the residence in several years ago by a gunman targeting the judge.

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

“Federal judges are protected by the presidential protection and the Marshals Service. And these are dedicated law enforcement that sit structurally inside the federal agency. And the former AG has been leading the attacks on federal judges.”

Administration Aims

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