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Donald Trump rarely accepts advice, especially from foreign leaders who frequently attempt to praise and compliment the US president.

However, the Central American nation's strongman president Nayib Bukele has followed a distinct approach by urging the Trump administration to emulate his actions in impeaching so-called “corrupt judges.”

His appeal for the president to move against the American court system also received support from Maga figures, such as an X post by one-time supporter the billionaire, who has previously boosted Bukele's calls to impeach US judges.

Unprecedented Threats to Court Autonomy

Experts say that Bukele's recent intervention occur of unprecedented dangers to judicial independence and individual judges in the US, and during a phase where the president's team is using similar strong-arm tactics employed by rulers in nations such as Türkiye, the European state, the Asian nation, and his native the Central American country to weaken democratic accountability.

Bukele's social media statement recently was one more in a string of taunts and claims he has made against the US's legal system, including a spring assertion that the US was “facing a judicial coup,” and ridicule of a federal judge's order to halt deportation flights sending accused illegal immigrants to his country's brutal prison system.

Criticism on Federal Judge

Bukele's demand for removal was also made amid online criticism on Oregon justice Karin Immergut by White House aide Stephen Miller, attorney general Bondi, Elon Musk, and Trump himself in a recent media briefing.

Immergut had ordered injunctions preventing Trump from mobilizing the military reserves, initially in the state then in California. The president has been eager to dispatch troops into Portland, which the leader has described as “battle-scarred” based on limited, peaceful protests outside the urban homeland security facility.

History of Attacking Judges

The advisor, Bondi, and the entrepreneur have a long record of attacking judges who have ruled against Trump's executive orders or in other ways impeded the government's policy goals. Prior to returning to power this year, Trump urged his supporters against judges presiding over his civil and criminal trials, who were then deluged with intimidation and abuse.

Watchdog organizations, police departments, and judges themselves have pointed to a heightened atmosphere of threats and coercion in the period since he re-entered the presidency.

Increasing Risk Data

Based on data collected by the federal agency, in the current year through the end of September, there were over five hundred threats to 395 federal judges, giving rise to 805 investigations. 2025 has already eclipsed 2022, and last year, and is on track to top the previous year's record of over six hundred reported incidents.

The threats are not just happening at the national level. Data from Princeton's research project indicates that there have been at least fifty-nine cases of intimidation, targeting, surveillance, or violence directed against judges on the local level in the current year.

Analyst Analysis on Root Causes

Specialists say that the intimidation are a result of the language coming from top government officials.

In spring, the watchdog group published a detailed report alleging that “harmful and highly irresponsible statements from Trump administration members and supporters align with escalating aggressive posts on online platforms.” It noted “a 54% rise in calls for impeachment and violent threats against judges across social media platforms from January to February 2025, the initial period of the president's term.”

Beirich, the co-founder of GPAHE, said: “Trump’s threats against judges have definitely fueled digital abuse at judges and calls for impeachment. Targeting the courts is one more step in the administration's advance towards strongman rule.”

Global Strongman Tactics

This progression towards autocracy has been well-trodden in recent years in several nations, such as by the Salvadoran.

In several years ago, immediately after starting a second term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, the president's parliamentary loyalists voted to dismiss the nation's attorney general and five judges on the constitutional court. The justices, who had provoked his ire by rejecting pandemic policies, made way for new appointees selected by Bukele.

The action echoed Viktor Orbán’s overhaul of Hungary’s court system in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and attempts at comparable actions in the Middle Eastern state and Poland.

Weakening Court Autonomy

Analysts say that the threats and verbal assaults in the US can be viewed as efforts to weaken judicial independence in a structure that offers no easy way for the executive to dismiss judges the administration disapproves of.

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

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

Pointing to instances such as the advisor's relentless claims of nearly limitless presidential authority, she noted: “They directly attack the courts by repeating over and over that it is not a equal branch in the government structure.

“They persist in reframe the discussion by emphasizing their argument that the executive has more power than this judicial branch, which is not how separation powers work.”

Leonard said: “Judges' sole safeguard is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their capacity to make those rulings. Individual threats on top of eroding institutional legitimacy may make judges hesitate about judgments that go against the current administration, which is, of course, massively problematic for judicial review and for the political system.”

Coercion Methods

Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of sociology and global studies at Princeton University, has written about the use of “authoritarian law” by the likes of Orbán and the Russian, and has warned about escalating dangers to judges in the US.

She highlighted a wave of termed “pizza doxxings” this year, in which judges have received unsolicited food orders with the customer listed as a name, the son of Justice Salas, who was killed at the judge’s home in several years ago by a gunman aiming at Salas.

“All knows what it means. ‘Your address is known. You are a target,’” Scheppele said.

“US justices are guarded by the presidential protection and the Marshals Service. And these are specialized police units that are placed structurally inside the Department of Justice. And the former AG has been leading the criticism on justices.”

Administration Aims

Regarding the government's objectives, the expert said that “impeaching a US justice is highly not going to happen because it’s very difficult to do. {Right now|Currently