Donald Trump is not known for taking advice, especially from foreign leaders who often seek to flatter and compliment the US president.
But El Salvador’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele has followed a different tack by calling on the Trump administration to follow his example in impeaching “corrupt judges”.
His call for Trump to take action against the US judiciary also received support from Maga figures, including an X post by one-time close Trump ally Elon Musk, who has in the past boosted Bukele’s calls to impeach US judges.
Experts say Bukele’s latest intervention comes at a time of unprecedented threats to judicial independence and individual judges in the US, and in a period where the Trump administration is employing the same authoritarian tactics used by authoritarians in countries such as Turkey, Hungary, India and Bukele’s own El Salvador to subvert democratic accountability.
Bukele’s online call last week was just the latest in a long series of taunts and allegations he has made against the US’s legal system, including a March claim that the US was “facing a judicial coup”, and his mockery of a federal judge’s order to halt deportation flights sending accused illegal immigrants to his country’s brutal prison system.
Bukele’s impeachment call was also made amid social media attacks on Oregon federal judge Karin Immergut by presidential advisor Stephen Miller, attorney general Pam Bondi, Musk, and Trump himself in a recent press gaggle.
Immergut had issued restraining orders preventing Trump from mobilizing the national guard, first in Oregon then in California. Trump has been gunning to send troops into Portland, which the president has characterized as “war-ravaged” on the basis of small, non-violent protests outside the city’s homeland security facility.
Miller, Bondi and Musk have a long record of attacking judges who have ruled against Trump’s executive orders or otherwise impeded the administration’s political agenda. Before resuming office this year, Trump directed his followers against judges presiding over his civil and criminal trials, who were then deluged with threats and harassment.
Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies and judges themselves have pointed to a heightened atmosphere of threats and intimidation in the months since he re-entered the White House.
According to data gathered by the US Marshals Service, in 2025 through to the end of September, there were 562 threats to 395 federal judges, giving rise to 805 investigations. 2025 has already eclipsed 2022, the first year of published records, and 2024, and is on track to exceed 2023’s record of 630 threats made.
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 instances of threats, harassment, stalking, or violence committed against judges on the local level in 2025.
Experts say that the threats are a product of the rhetoric coming from senior administration figures.
In May, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) published a detailed report alleging that “malicious and highly irresponsible statements from Trump administration members and allies coincide with escalating violent posts on social media”. It recorded “a 54% increase in calls for impeachment and violent threats against judges across social media platforms from January to February 2025, the first full month of Trump’s administration”.
Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of GPAHE, said: “Trump’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 march towards authoritarianism.”
That march towards authoritarianism has been well-trodden in recent years in several countries, including by Bukele.
In 2021, immediately after commencing a second term in the face of constitutional prohibitions, Bukele’s parliamentary loyalists voted to dismiss the country’s attorney general and five justices on the constitutional court. The judges, who had provoked his ire by ruling against coronavirus measures, made way for replacements hand picked by Bukele.
The move echoed Viktor Orbán’s remodeling of Hungary’s court system in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges in 2019; and attempts at similar moves in Israel and Poland.
Experts say that the threats and rhetorical attacks in the US can be seen as attempts to undermine judicial independence in a system that offers no easy way for the executive to dismiss judges Trump disapproves of.
Meghan Leonard, an associate professor at Illinois State University who has researched authoritarian backsliding in democracies, said the Trump administration had learned from the examples set by authoritarians overseas.
“The administration is looking around at these successes and failures. They know they’re not going to be able to pass any legislation that would weaken the judiciary,” she said.
Pointing to examples such as Miller’s relentless assertions of nearly limitless presidential authority, she added: “They directly attack the judiciary by repeating over and over that it is not a co-equal branch in the separation of powers.
“They continue to reframe the debate by repeating their claim that the president has more power than this other co-equal branch, which is not how separation powers work.”
Leonard said: “Judges’ only protection is people’s belief in the legitimacy of their ability to make those decisions. Individual threats on top of weakening institutional legitimacy may make judges think twice about decisions that go against the current administration, which is, of course, massively problematic for judicial review and for democracy.”
Kim Lane Scheppele, professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, has written about the use of “autocratic legalism“ by the likes of Orbán and Putin, and has spoken out about escalating threats to judges in the US.
She pointed to a wave of so-called “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.
“Everyone understands what it means. ‘We know where you live. ‘We’re coming for you,’” Scheppele said.
“Federal judges are protected by the Secret Service and the Marshals Service. And those are both specialized police units that sit institutionally inside the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi has been leading the attacks on federal judges”
On the administration’s aims, Scheppele said that “impeaching a federal judge is almost certainly not going to happen because it’s so hard to do. Right now, I don’t think that the desire of the Trump administration is to remove the judges via impeachment. It is to scare the judges enough to get some of them to think twice about ruling against the administration.”
She said: “Bukele knows how to play that game. He’s very skilled at it. I’m not surprised that he’s annotating the US crisis and cheering on Trump. He knows that Trump lives online; he’s also currying favor.”
Beirich said: “It’s not surprising that someone like Bukele would do this, or Hungary’s Orbán, given their autocratic behavior. But an American president supposedly supportive of democracy should know better.”
