Arresting Judges, the Trump Administration Follows the Autocratic Playbook

Authoritarianism involves arranging government to keep the leader and his cronies safe from prosecution and allow them to commit crimes and corrupt acts with impunity. That means judges and prosecutors who uphold the rule of law are always among those harassed and persecuted.

Attacks on independent judiciaries are part of broader authoritarian attempts at delegitimization, which entails the creation of an aura of illegality and corruption around any institution and individual that supports the democratic principles of impartial justice, accountability, equity, transparency, and human rights.

Disinformation and propaganda campaigns waged by ascendent or sitting authoritarians aim to change collective attitudes on these subjects. Judicial authorities who were previously respected as paragons of rectitude must instead be seen as subversives who are trying to harm the leader and make the country less safe.

Judges and prosecutors are always targets of such campaigns, and the arrest and federal grand jury indictment of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly obstructing the arrest of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an undocumented immigrant, is a case in point. The government’s intrusion into Judge Dugan’s courtroom (by contesting the actions she took during judicial proceedings she convened and oversees) mirrors the process of the executive branch asserting its control over an independent judiciary.

The Milwaukee County Courthouse. Photos: Wisconsin Justice Initiative.

Likewise, the allegations that Judge Dugan somehow colluded with Mr. Flores-Ruiz to let him escape from the courthouse, and thus evade justice, are supposed to associate her in the public’s mind with criminal behavior. And the spectacle created by the deployment of FBI agents as well as ICE operatives to the courthouse, spun as a public safety operation by MAGA, transforms the courthouse from a space of justice to a space of supposed illegality. Optics are always at the forefront of this administration’s actions.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, speaking on de facto state propaganda channel Fox “News,” explicitly framed the arrest as a warning to other judges who “think that they are above and beyond the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today…if you are harboring a fugitive…we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

Bondi, a practiced Fox messenger, chooses her words carefully. “We will find you” implies that judges are the criminals on the run – an excellent example of a delegitimization tactic. The more than 150 former state and federal judges who signed a letter to Bondi, protesting Judge Dugan’s arrest, know the stakes.

Judge Dugan has pleaded not guilty to the charges, but must stand trial in July, and that trial will doubtless provide more material for Trump’s propaganda operation. It will also be an opportunity for us to expose MAGA machinations and remind the public why the administration is taking these actions.

MAGA Has Been Threatening Judges and Discrediting Our Democratic Justice System for Years

I know where this judges-on-trial playbook leads. I have seen it successfully deployed in Russia, Turkey, and other autocracies that use the judiciary to stage show trials and carry out political persecutions. “In modern-day Russia, under Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime, courts serve merely as a tool used by the Kremlin to target critics and stifle dissent,” reads a 2023 Human Rights Foundation essay. The same is increasingly true in Turkey, as this 2024 UN report details.

That is why, as convicted felon Donald Trump ramped up his election campaign in 2024, I tracked the coordinated attempts of Trump’s accomplices in and outside of the GOP to discredit any institution and authority associated with democratic concepts and systems of justice. Building on years of relentless propaganda and intimidation of members of the judiciary, MAGA made it clear that the democratic legal system and those who are its guardians in courtrooms across America would be targeted if Trump returned to power.

An April 2024 essay focused on the unprecedented wave of threats to American judges, drawing on investigations done by the still-free press. A Reuters analysis that drew on interviews with 18 judges (14 in service and four retired) found that threats against federal judges alone more than doubled since 2020, when over 60 judges (many Republican-appointed) turned back challenges to the validity of the 2020 election. And the Washington Post reported that Trump has gone after federal judges and their families 138 times since 2022.

Judges and Prosecutors, Targeted by Trump, Will Not Be Intimidated

It is important to amplify the words of the targeted judges –something which is not even possible in many autocracies. “We had never even contemplated that one of us could get killed in this job,” said U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who was interviewed for the Reuters article. Judge Lamberth had been harassed in the past by drug dealers and gangsters, but was unprepared for the volume of hatred from another kind of thug: MAGA loyalists. “I couldn’t believe how many death threats I got,” he said.

Judge Lamberth refused to be intimidated. On April 3, 2024, while sentencing a Jan. 6 rioter for multiple crimes, including assaulting a police officer, the judge condemned the “normalization” of Jan. 6 and warned that the contestation of future election results could manifest as widespread “vigilantism, lawlessness, and anarchy.”

Then there is Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s hush-money criminal trial. With Judge Merchan, Trump made recourse to one of the oldest weapons in the authoritarian playbook –go after the target’s family— by labelling the Judge’s daughter as a “Rabid Trump Hater” and posting photos of her to facilitate harassment by his followers.

“Happy Easter to all, including crooked and corrupt prosecutors and judges that are doing everything possible to interfere with the presidential election of 2024, and put me in prison,” Trump posted on Easter Sunday 2024, making sure his followers saw those individuals as menacing his own safety.

One year later, having returned to the White House and installed a loyalist as Attorney General, Trump can seek revenge on all judges by threatening to put one in prison.

To get public buy-in for this escalation, the long-term propaganda work of delegitimating all aspects of a rule-of-law system –the courts, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, legal commentators, etc—comes in handy. So does linking such persecutions of judges to the cause of “saving the nation” from corruption or crime.

This is why, during Trump’s May 2024 criminal trial, MAGA loyalist and Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), showed up at the New York courthouse to curate the propaganda operation. Johnson did not only denounce the specific attempt to hold Trump accountable as a “sham” and a “travesty of justice,” but also attacked the larger court system that made the trial possible, calling it politicized and “corrupt.”

For the autocratic mentality, the idea that Trump could face a criminal trial at all was the outrage. Any system that allowed that would have to be corrected once they returned to power. Authoritarians make it difficult or impossible to carry out justice as it is understood in democracies, whether it is making sure immigrants or other groups deemed state enemies are not deported or imprisoned unlawfully, or prosecuting the powerful.

The goal of authoritarianism is to make the law into an instrument of the state’s ideological and political agendas, and judges stand in the way of that. That’s why MAGA is mobilizing around the cause of criminalizing judges who have the tenacity to believe that everyone is equal in front of the law. But we can continue to expose their methods and reveal their ultimate goals. As former Judge J. Michael Luttig recently wrote, prompted by the aggression against Judge Dugan: the “arrest and prosecution of judges on such specious charges is where rule by law ends and tyranny begins.”