Members of Congress, said Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (R) Wednesday, are being intimidated into silence by South African Nazi billionaire Elon Musk and others on Team Trump. “When people say, why aren’t you a better Republican? And if you’re not, get out of the party. You know what? You know what? Until Alaskans tell me, Lisa, it’s just not working anymore, I am going to give you every last breath that I have. And I’m going to try to solve every little problem. And I’m not going to compromise my own integrity by hiding from my words when I feel they need to be spoken. I’m going to take the criticism that comes. And it may be that Elon Musk has decided he’s going to take the next billion dollars that he makes off of Starlink and put it directly against Lisa Murkowski. And you know what? That may happen. But I’m not giving up one minute, one opportunity to try to stand up for Alaskans. But I’ve got to figure out how to do that. And I need Alaskans’ help to tell me what they’re feeling so that I can help deal with that. “I get criticized for what I say, and then everybody else is like, well, how come nobody else is saying anything? Well, figure it out, because they’re looking at how many things are being thrown at me, and it’s like, maybe I just better duck and cover. That’s why you’ve got everybody just. Like, zip-lipped, not saying a word, because they’re afraid they’re going to be taken down, they’re going to be primaried, they’re going to be given names in the media. You know what? We cannot be cowed into not speaking up.”
You may get a tiny, wimpery bit like this here and there, but, basically, Congress is little more than a head-shaking bobble doll now with a pathetic Democratic opposition led by puny careerists like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. So that leaves the third branch of government— the judiciary— to protect the country from the authoritarian takeover, now, you may have noticed, in full swing. And Trump, Vance, Musk and the Project 2025 crowd are savaging judges daily to remove that last barrier. On Wednesday, the NY Times reported that judges fear for their safety. “The pipe bomb [at Amy Coney Barrett’s sister’s home] proved to be a hoax,” wrote Mattathias Schwartz and Abbie VanSickle, “but the threats and intimidation faced by judges and their families in recent weeks are real, judges say. At a moment when the judiciary is weighing pivotal decisions on the legality of Trump administration policies, the potential for violence against judges seems to be rising. ‘I feel like people are playing Russian roulette with our lives,’ said Judge Esther Salas of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son was shot and killed at her home in 2020 by a self-described ‘anti-feminist’ lawyer. ‘This is not hyperbole,’ she added. ‘I am begging our leaders to realize that there are lives at stake.’ The threats and intimidation may have not become actual violence, but they appear to be mounting, as Trump, his advisers and his supporters are questioning almost daily the legitimacy of the American legal system. There is no evidence that jurists’ judgment in the high-profile cases before them has been warped by their antagonists. But at the least, public perceptions of judicial decisions could be shaped by the volume of attacks on the courts. The attempts at intimidation have taken many forms: bomb threats, anonymous calls to dispatch police SWAT teams to home addresses, even the delivery of pizzas, a seemingly innocuous prank but one that carries a message.”
In his social media post on Tuesday, Trump did not just demand that District Judge James Boasberg be impeached; he also called the judge, who issued an order temporarily blocking the administration’s plan to deport Venezuelan immigrants, a “Radical Left Lunatic, a troublemaker and agitator.”
The post prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to rebuke Trump in a rare public statement. “Impeachment,” he wrote, “is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
But by then, Trump’s followers had already followed his lead. Pseudonymous social media accounts called judges who ruled against the president “traitors” and “lawless.” One post called Judge Boasberg a “terrorist-loving judge.” Another suggested that he be sent “to GITMO for 20 years.”
Laura Loomer, a close ally of Trump, trained the attention of her 1.5 million online followers on Judge Boasberg’s daughter.
“His family is a national security threat,” she wrote.
Yesterday, Sarah Ellison and Clara Morse reported that weeks before Senor Trumpanzyy “called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his agenda, his supporters around the nation seeded the ground to turn public opinion against the institution that has been the leading check on his administration.” One fascist influencer who uses the name Catturd on Twitter (and has 3.6 million followers) wrote of the judge who put a temporary halt to the destruction of USAID “The judge is not the president. Ignore. Fire them all. Keep going.” Trump’s and Musk’s neo-fascist influencers on Twitter are calling it “a coup by the judiciary against the elected government.”
The message received 25,000 retweets— including from Musk— and nearly 20 million views.
“This is an activist posing as a judge,” Musk wrote.
“Ignore this activist pos,” wrote Catturd, using an abbreviation for the vulgar insult “piece of shit.”
“The supreme court must intervene. This is judicial activism,” the influential YouTuber Benny Johnson wrote.
Those posts came nearly seven weeks before the Trump administration began attacking a court order temporarily blocking his administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants without due process under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law previously invoked only during wartime. Some legal experts said this defiance brings the country dangerously close to a constitutional crisis.
“He’s utterly obligated to follow lower federal courts. That’s not a maybe,” said Amanda Frost, a constitutional scholar and director of the University of Virginia’s Immigration, Migration and Human Rights Program.
Degrading trust in the courts can be remarkably effective in damaging their power because they lack the capacity to enforce their judgments, other scholars said.
“If you change dramatically the cultural expectations of what the executive branch will do to judges when judges issue orders that it doesn’t like, then it’s not obvious what prevents the courts from becoming a body that announces opinions about things and then everybody goes about doing what they want to do anyway,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor in chief of the Lawfare blog.
As the Trump administration presses its maximalist view of executive power, a network of supporters with giant social media followings has been pushing the view— unsupported by any court— that the judges, not the administration, are acting unconstitutionally and need to be removed from their positions. Experts say this unprecedented position has little legal basis but is nevertheless potent because of the way the administration is trying to sell it to the public.
“The ancient Greeks knew that repetition breeds liking,” said Renee Hobbs, a professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island. “Social psychologists proved it in the 1970s: The more you hear a message, the more it seems true.”
The messages online and in conservative media zeroed in on the idea that the district judges ruling against the administration were acting unconstitutionally and therefore should be ignored. Before long, the messages began urging judicial impeachment.
In the past week, prominent right-wing politicians and influencers have made hundreds of posts about judicial impeachment, a sevenfold increase from the previous week and a massive jump from the time of Trump’s inauguration, when impeaching judges was discussed by only a few accounts.
A pro-Trump audience was primed for this moment after years of consuming and sharing his regular messages of distrust about the coronavirus pandemic, election fraud and “deep-state” corruption.
Throughout, Musk has been a leading voice pushing to punish the judges. He has repeatedly pressed the view that Trump’s narrow electoral victory grants him near limitless power to reshape the federal government— and defy the judiciary. He has led the call for more power for the administration— and himself.
Musk, who shifted the algorithm on Twitter to favor his posts, has adopted an unprecedented role within the federal government while still operating his vast business empire. He has posted or reposted calls to impeach judges more than 40 times in the past two months, according to a Washington Post analysis.
On Wednesday, Musk called again for the impeachment of another federal judge who had recently ruled against the Trump administration.
Musk shared a post on Twitter from conservative activist Charlie Kirk responding to a ruling from D.C. federal judge Ana Reyes against the administration. “We either have a presidency or we have a rule by 677 gavel-wielding dictators,” the post read.
“This is a judicial coup,” Musk responded. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.” Musk misunderstood how the removal process works: The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict an impeached official, which would mean 67 senators if all are present.
Convicting an impeached judge would require support from at least four Democrats and independents in the chamber, which is highly unlikely.
…Trump’s allies are rewriting history to place him— and his assault on the judiciary— in the company of some of the nation’s most famous presidents.
So far none have mentioned that conservatives cheered when district judges issued injunctions against the Biden administration to stop policies they opposed. A federal judge in Missouri temporarily blocked the Biden administration in 2024 from implementing a plan to forgive student loan debt held by millions of Americans.
On Monday, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles invoked Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt when he said that “great American presidents— great in the historic sense, really significant American presidents— have ignored the Supreme Court on much shakier, more dubious grounds than Trump is doing.”
Lincoln controversially suspended habeas corpus, which gives detainees the right to appear before a judge, during the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt led an unsuccessful effort to expand the Supreme Court.
But those presidents did not openly scorn the credibility of the third branch the way that Trump and his allies have with a harsh influence campaign that now includes calls for official government action.
First, government lawyers called for the removal of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who blocked the deportation of Venezuelans accused of being gang members, and they refused to answer questions in court.
Then, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that restrictions shielding administrative law judges from removal are unconstitutional and that the Justice Department will no longer defend them in court.
House Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation— the “No Rogue Rulings Act (NORRA)— to limit district court judges from issuing injunctions that apply beyond their district.
And Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri posted on Twitter that he plans to introduce legislation to stop what he called “this abuse” of district court judges issuing national injunctions against the Trump administration.
Even the chief justice of the United States is not immune from the attacks.
When John Roberts on Tuesday issued a rebuke of Trump’s call for the impeachment of federal judges who oppose his policies, Trump’s online army declared that he should be impeached, too.
Mike Davis, a former Republican Senate and Bush White House aide and a central figure in the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh who now runs the Article III Project, quickly set the tone with his response to Roberts’s statement that impeachment is “not an appropriate response to disagreement.”
That evening, on Fox News’s The Five, Greg Gutfeld offered a cruder response. “Maybe a guy in a robe in D.C. can follow all the protocols, but Trump is the fucking president of the United States who protects 300 million-plus people,” Gutfeld said. “He is a leader who does not have the luxury of opening up his little books to read, ‘Oh, my God, maybe he didn’t do it the right way.’ Roberts, shut the eff up.”
Trump kept up his attacks and urged in a post Thursday night for the Supreme Court to intervene, or else the “Unlawful Nationwide Injunctions by Radical Left Judges could very well lead to the destruction of our Country!” he wrote.
Bernie, on the other hand, has a very different way of looking at this:
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