Maga Supporters Endorse El Salvador Leader's Call for US President to Target American Judges

The US President does not usually take guidance, particularly from foreign leaders who often seek to flatter and compliment the American leader.

However, El Salvador's authoritarian leader Bukele has adopted a different approach by calling on the Trump administration to emulate his actions in removing what he terms “corrupt judges.”

The call for the president to take action against the American court system also received backing from Trump allies, including an X post by one-time close Trump ally Elon Musk, who has previously boosted the Salvadoran's demands to impeach US judges.

Growing Risks to Court Autonomy

Experts say that Bukele's recent remarks come at a time of unprecedented threats to court autonomy and individual judges in the United States, and during a phase where the Trump administration is employing comparable authoritarian tactics employed by rulers in countries such as Turkey, the European state, the Asian nation, and Bukele's own the Central American country to undermine government oversight.

Bukele's online statement recently was just the latest in a long series of provocations and allegations he has leveled against the American judiciary, such as a March assertion that the US was “experiencing a court takeover,” and ridicule of a federal judge's order to stop deportation flights sending accused illegal immigrants to his country's harsh prison system.

Attacks on Federal Judge

The Salvadoran's impeachment call was also made during online criticism on the state's federal judge Judge Immergut by White House aide Stephen Miller, former AG Bondi, Elon Musk, and the president himself in a recent media briefing.

Immergut had ordered restraining orders preventing Trump from mobilizing the military reserves, first in Oregon then in California. The president has been pushing to dispatch soldiers into Portland, which the leader has described as “battle-scarred” based on limited, peaceful protests outside the city's homeland security facility.

History of Attacking Judges

The advisor, the former AG, and the entrepreneur have a long record of attacking judges who have ruled against Trump's executive orders or in other ways hindered the administration's political agenda. Before returning to power recently, the president directed his supporters against judges presiding over his legal cases, who were then inundated with threats and harassment.

Watchdog organizations, law enforcement agencies, and judges themselves have highlighted a heightened climate of threats and coercion in the months since he re-entered the White House.

Rising Risk Data

According to information collected by the US Marshals Service, in 2025 through the end of September, there were 562 threats to nearly four hundred federal judges, leading to 805 investigations. This year has already eclipsed the first recorded year, and last year, and is on track to exceed 2023's record of over six hundred threats.

The threats are not only happening at the national level. Data from the university's research project indicates that there have been at least fifty-nine instances of threats, harassment, stalking, or violence committed against judges on the state and municipal levels in the current year.

Analyst Analysis on Root Causes

Experts say that the threats are a product of the language coming from senior administration figures.

In spring, the watchdog group published a comprehensive report alleging that “harmful and highly irresponsible statements from Trump administration members and supporters align with rising aggressive posts on online platforms.” It recorded “a 54% rise in calls for removal and physical intimidation against judges across digital networks from the first two months 2025, the first full month of the president's term.”

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 courts is one more step in the administration's march towards authoritarianism.”

International Authoritarian Playbook

That march towards authoritarianism has been well-trodden in recent years in multiple countries, such as by the Salvadoran.

In 2021, right after starting a new term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, the president's parliamentary loyalists voted to remove the country’s top prosecutor and several justices on the constitutional court. The judges, who had angered him by ruling against pandemic policies, made way for replacements hand picked by the leader.

The action mirrored Viktor Orbán’s remodeling of Hungary’s court system in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and efforts at similar moves in the Middle Eastern state and Poland.

Weakening Judicial Independence

Experts explain that the threats and rhetorical attacks in the US can be seen as efforts to weaken court autonomy in a structure that provides no simple method for the president to remove judges Trump opposes.

Meghan Leonard, an academic at the university who has researched democratic decline in free nations, said the White House had learned from the models set by strongmen abroad.

“The administration is observing at these achievements and failures. They know they’re not going to be able to enact any legislation that would undermine the judiciary,” she said.

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

“They persist in redefine the debate by repeating their argument that the executive has greater authority than this judicial branch, which is not how checks and balances work.”

The professor said: “Justices' sole safeguard is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their ability to make those rulings. Individual threats on top of weakening trust in courts may make judges hesitate about judgments that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, massively problematic for judicial review and for democracy.”

Coercion Methods

Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of sociology and global studies at Princeton University, has documented the use of “autocratic legalism” by the such as Orbán and Putin, and has spoken out about rising threats to judges in the US.

She highlighted a series of termed “pizza doxxings” this year, in which judges have received unsolicited pizza deliveries with the recipient listed as Daniel Anderl, the son of Judge Esther Salas, who was killed at the judge’s home in 2020 by a gunman targeting Salas.

“All understands what it means. ‘Your address is known. You are a target,’” the professor said.

“Federal judges are guarded by the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. And those are both dedicated law enforcement that sit institutionally inside the Department of Justice. And the former AG has been spearheading the attacks on federal judges.”

Administration Aims

Regarding the administration’s objectives, the expert said that “removing a US justice is highly not going to happen because it’s so hard to do. {Right now|Currently