How the campaign to impeach judges took off among Trump allies

Weeks before President Donald Trump 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.

In early February, after Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols temporarily blocked the administration from placing thousands of employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on paid leave, the conservative social media account Catturd weighed in on the issue to his 3.6 million followers. “The judge is not the president. Ignore. Fire them all. Keep going,” the influencer posted on X.

The next day, when a different judge blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive Treasury Department records, the conservative account @amuse shared similar sentiments to more than half a million followers about the federal judiciary. The account accused U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, an appointee of Barack Obama, of fomenting “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.

“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 X 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 X from conservative activist Charlie Kirk responding to a ruling from D.C. federal judge Ana C. 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.

This is not the first time Trump has called for a judge who displeased him to be impeached. In November 2023, Trump posted on Truth Social that both Arthur F. Engoron, the New York judge who oversaw the civil fraud trial brought against him, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought the case, should be impeached and removed from office.

“REMOVE THEM AND DISMISS THIS RIDICULOUS, NO VICTIM, NO JURY, CASE!” he wrote.

Dating back to his first presidential campaign in 2016, Trump attacked federal judge Gonzalo Curiel of California, who oversaw the fraud case against Trump University in San Diego. At the time, Trump called the judge a “hater” and alleged that Curiel, who is an Indiana-born American citizen of Mexican heritage, was antagonistic toward Trump because Curiel was a “Mexican” who resented Trump’s proposed border wall.

But Trump was not in office then and had not helped nurture a network of media-savvy loyalists. Nearly a decade later, those figures have formed a key messaging apparatus that both informs and amplifies the Trump administration’s positions.

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 D. 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 E. 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 X 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 G. Roberts Jr. 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 M. Gorsuch and Brett M. 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.”

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.

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Amber Phillips contributed to this report.