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The US President does not usually take advice, especially from foreign leaders who often attempt to praise and admire the US president.

But, the Central American nation's strongman president Bukele has adopted a different strategy by calling on the Trump administration to emulate his actions in impeaching so-called “corrupt judges.”

His appeal for Trump to move against the US judiciary also received support from Trump allies, including an social media message by one-time supporter the billionaire, who has in the past boosted the Salvadoran's calls to oust US judges.

Growing Risks to Court Autonomy

Analysts note that Bukele's recent remarks come at a time of unmatched dangers to judicial independence and specific justices in the United States, and during a period where the Trump administration is using similar authoritarian methods employed by rulers in nations such as Türkiye, the European state, the Asian nation, and his native El Salvador to weaken democratic accountability.

Bukele's online call last week was just the latest in a long series of provocations and claims he has leveled against the American judiciary, such as a spring claim that the US was “experiencing a court takeover,” and ridicule of a court's order to stop removal operations transporting accused undocumented individuals to his country's brutal correctional facilities.

Attacks on Federal Judge

The Salvadoran's demand for removal was also made amid online criticism on Oregon federal judge Karin Immergut by presidential advisor Miller, attorney general Pam Bondi, Elon Musk, and the president personally in a latest media briefing.

The judge had ordered restraining orders blocking the administration from deploying the national guard, initially in Oregon then in the West Coast state. The president has been eager to dispatch soldiers into Portland, which the president has characterized as “war-ravaged” based on small, non-violent protests outside the urban federal building.

Record of Attacking Judges

Miller, Bondi, and the entrepreneur have a long record of criticizing judges who have ruled against presidential directives or in other ways hindered the administration's political agenda. Prior to resuming office recently, Trump directed his supporters against judges overseeing his civil and criminal trials, who were then deluged with intimidation and harassment.

Monitoring groups, law enforcement agencies, and the justices have pointed to a heightened atmosphere of threats and intimidation in the months since he re-entered the White House.

Rising Risk Data

According to information collected by the federal agency, in 2025 through the end of September, there were 562 incidents to nearly four hundred US justices, leading to 805 investigations. This year has already eclipsed 2022, and last year, and is likely to exceed the previous year's record of over six hundred 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 threats, targeting, surveillance, or physical attacks committed against judges on the state and municipal levels in the current year.

Expert Analysis on Threat Sources

Experts say that the intimidation are a product of the rhetoric coming from top government officials.

In May, the watchdog group published a detailed report claiming that “harmful and highly irresponsible statements from White House allies and allies align with escalating aggressive posts on online platforms.” It recorded “a 54% increase in demands for impeachment and physical intimidation against judges across social media platforms from the first two months 2025, the initial period of the president's term.”

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the organization, said: “The president's threats against judges have certainly fueled online vitriol at judges and calls for ouster. Targeting the judiciary is another move in the administration's march towards authoritarianism.”

International Strongman Playbook

This progression towards authoritarianism has been common in the past decade in several nations, such as by the Salvadoran.

In 2021, immediately after starting a second term despite legal bans, the president's allies in congress voted to remove the country’s attorney general and five judges on the constitutional court. The judges, who had angered him by rejecting pandemic policies, were replaced by replacements hand picked by Bukele.

The move echoed the Hungarian leader's remodeling of the nation's judiciary in 2018; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s judicial purges recently; and efforts at similar moves in Israel and Poland.

Undermining Court Autonomy

Experts explain 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 disapproves of.

Leonard, an associate professor at the university who has researched authoritarian backsliding in democracies, said the Trump administration had learned 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 pass any legislation that would weaken the courts,” she said.

Pointing to instances such as the advisor's persistent assertions of nearly limitless executive power, she added: “They openly criticize the judiciary by repeating over and over that it is not a co-equal branch in the government structure.

“They continue to reframe the discussion by repeating their claim that the president has greater authority than this other co-equal branch, which is not how separation powers work.”

Leonard said: “Justices' only protection is public trust in the legitimacy of their capacity to make those rulings. Individual threats on top of eroding trust in courts may make judges hesitate about decisions that go against the sitting government, which is, of course, massively problematic for judicial review and for the political system.”

Coercion Methods

Scheppele, academic of sociology and global studies at Princeton University, has documented the use of “autocratic legalism” by the likes of the Hungarian and the Russian, and has spoken out about rising dangers to judges in the US.

She highlighted a series of termed “pizza doxxings” this year, in which judges have received unwanted food orders with the customer listed as a name, the child of Justice Salas, who was killed at the residence in 2020 by a assailant aiming at the judge.

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

“US justices are protected by the presidential protection and the Marshals Service. And those are both specialized police units that sit structurally inside the Department of Justice. And Pam Bondi has been spearheading the criticism on justices.”

Administration Aims

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