United States President Donald Trump has doubled down on his criticism of a federal judge, calling him “radical left” for blocking the deportation of Venezuelan migrants, as his administration ramps up rhetoric against the courts.
Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of Judge James Boasberg, accusing him of putting the US at risk. “We don’t want vicious, violent, and demented criminals, many of them deranged murderers, in our country,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday.
Boasberg, who serves in the federal district court in Washington, DC, has come under attack since he issued an order to block deportation flights on Saturday.
The Trump administration has been accused of ignoring Boasberg’s orders by sending several planes carrying Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador prisons notorious for rights abuses. Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an obscure law meant to target nationals from an enemy nation during wartime.
The courts have blocked several of Trump’s executive orders amid little resistance from the Republican-controlled Congress, attracting the wrath of the officials.
Attorney General Pam Bondi accused the judge of “meddling in our government” while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt believes judges are acting as “judicial activists”.
The US president on his part called Boasberg a “radical left lunatic” “appointed by [former president] Barack Hussein Obama”.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has criticised calls to impeach Judge Boasberg, but that has not stopped Trump from attacking the judge. The US president lashed out at Roberts as well, suggesting the Supreme Court itself was compromised by political bias.
The latest rhetoric is just one in a series of attacks Trump has launched against judges and courts who challenge his policies or hold him accountable in cases brought against him.
Why have Trump and officials from his administration clashed with the judiciary? There’s a troubling pattern of Trump attacking judges and courts in the past. Let’s take a look.
A pattern of attacks?
Trump’s contempt for the courts predates his presidency but reached new levels during his time in office. Usually, if a ruling went against him, the judge was deemed by Trump biased, incompetent, or part of a left-wing conspiracy.
One of the earliest examples came in 2016 when Trump, then a presidential candidate, attacked US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing fraud lawsuits against his now-defunct Trump University. Trump suggested Curiel was unfit to preside over the case because of his Mexican heritage, calling him a “hater” and implying he could not be fair due to Trump’s hardline stance on immigration. The attack drew widespread condemnation.
Once in the White House, Trump continued to fight the judiciary. In 2017, when Judge James Robart issued a temporary block on his travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, Trump labelled him a “so-called judge” and accused him of endangering national security.
In 2018, Trump dubbed Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Jon Tigar “an Obama judge” after he ruled that an immigrant could claim asylum regardless of where she entered the country.
The same year, Trump attacked the judiciary after an appeals court in California blocked his administration from deporting young immigrants shielded under an Obama-era programme.
Trump did not hesitate to also target the Supreme Court when it ruled against him.
He was incensed when the court rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump continues to believe that his 2020 presidential election was stolen. In particular, he turned against Chief Justice Roberts, calling him “disgraceful” and “a disappointment”.
Did his attacks against the judiciary go up after the end of his first term?
As Trump’s legal troubles mounted after his presidency ended in 2020, his attacks on judges became even more personal. Facing multiple indictments ranging from election interference to business fraud, Trump often took to social media to condemn judges overseeing his cases.
In his New York civil fraud case, where he was found liable for boosting his net worth, Trump called Judge Arthur Engoron “unhinged” and a “Trump-hating, radical left, Democrat operative”. He mocked his law clerk on social media, saying he was “politically biased and corrupt”, prompting a gag order.
Despite the restriction, Trump did not hold back.
In his federal election interference case, presided over by Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump labelled her “highly partisan”, “very biased and unfair”, and suggested she was out to get him. His verbal assaults led prosecutors to argue that his rhetoric was endangering the judicial process and potentially inciting threats against judges and court staff.
Chutkan had warned Trump against making any “inflammatory statements” before the first hearing.
“Your client’s defence is supposed to happen in this courtroom, not on the internet,” Chutkan told Trump’s lawyers, adding that the more anyone made “inflammatory” statements about the case, the greater her urgency would be to quickly move the case to trial.
Trump also attacked liberal Supreme Court justices, particularly Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In 2020, Trump demanded that both judges “recuse” themselves from cases involving him, accusing them of bias, particularly after Sotomayor criticised the Trump administration’s frequent appeals to the top court to intervene in lower-court decisions.
Trump took to Twitter, which later became X, calling remarks by Sotomayor “highly inappropriate”.
His animosity towards Justice Ginsburg was even more pronounced. Before her passing in 2020, Ginsburg had publicly criticised Trump during his 2016 campaign, calling him a “faker” and expressing concern over his presidency.
Trump fired back, calling her a “disgrace” to the court and demanding she resign. After her death, he faced backlash for quickly nominating a conservative replacement, Amy Coney Barrett.
In 2020, Trump attacked Judge Amy Berman Jackson over the conviction of his long-term aide Roger Stone in a witness tempering case. He said Stone’s jury was “tainted’ with anti-Trump bias. The case symbolised political meddling in high-profile cases as Trump used social media to question the judiciary’s fairness. Stone was pardoned in December 2020 at the end of Trump’s first term.
Trump’s rhetoric has not only deepened scepticism towards the judiciary among his supporters but has also emboldened some to harass judges and their families. For example, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s New York criminal case, received death threats, and his court was flooded with hostile communications following Trump’s public criticisms.
Former federal judge J Michael Luttig last year called Trump’s rhetoric “vicious” and “an existential threat to the rule of law”, warning that undermining judicial independence could have long-term consequences for US democracy.
“His objective was to delegitimise those courts,” Luttig said of Trump’s repeated verbal attacks.
Trump administration’s fight against the judiciary
Trump, however, seems undeterred. With his second term in full swing, experts say anti-court rhetoric by Trump and his officials, including his close aide billionaire Elon Musk, may provoke a constitutional crisis.
Vice President JD Vance has been accused of attacking judges who blocked some of Trump’s executive orders. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote.
Agreeing with Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson said: “The courts should take a step back and allow these processes to play out.”
Days later, White House Press Secretary Leavitt said blocking some of Trump’s agenda is illegal.
Musk, Trump’s powerful adviser, has slammed judges in more than 30 social media posts since January. Last week, he called for a judge to be fired after the judge ordered the restoration of health-related webpages and datasets scrubbed from government websites.
The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired thousands of federal government employees and shut down federal agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as part of efforts to cut costs. On Wednesday, a judge said Musk and DOGE “likely violated” the constitution in the USAID shutdown.
The unprecedented rhetoric has alarmed legal experts.
“Under our system, up until now, it’s always been understood that it’s the courts that decide whether executive authority is legitimate or not,” Jeremy Paul, a law professor at Northeastern University, told The Associated Press news agency.
The US president has said he would not defy the court. “I follow the courts. I have to follow the law,” he said on Wednesday in the Oval Office. But the previous day he complained that judges were preventing his administration from stopping fraudulent government spending.
“We want to weed out the corruption, and it seems hard to believe that a judge could say we don’t want you to do that,” he said. “So, maybe we have to look at the judges because I think it’s a very serious violation.”
The new administration’s rhetoric comes as at least 60 lawsuits have been filed over Trump’s actions since he took office in January, slowing down his aggressive agenda, including the firing of thousands of federal employees to slash spending.
University of Pennsylvania law professor Claire Finkelstein said “there’s been a concerted effort to try to cast judges as the enemy.
“The idea that he can start removing judges is fanciful, but he can make their lives so difficult they maybe start resigning. I think that’s part of the attempt here,” she added.
What is the process to impeach US judges?
Amid a chorus to impeach judges, legal experts say it’s not an easy process. Members of the House can file articles of impeachment against a judge.
The Congress can impeach a judge if the House commands a simple majority. After the article is cleared, it goes to the Senate for trial. A two-thirds majority is required to convict a judge in the upper chamber of the Congress.
Republican House Representative Eli Crane has filed articles of impeachment against US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, who blocked DOGE’s access to Department of Treasury payment systems.
At least 15 judges have been impeached in US history.
