FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump dances, as he delivers remarks on the economy, at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, U.S. July 27, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Osorio/File Photo
President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked judges who rule against him by accusing them of being traitors and threats to America. Perhaps as he anticipated, his supporters have taken his rhetoric as a call to intimidate those same judges, from falsely reporting that a judge killed his wife and threatening judges with violence to vowing to commit sexual assault against them and harassing their family members.
Now one of those judges is speaking out against the bullying.
“It's not an easy thing for any of us to come forward and talk about the personal threats,” Judge John J. McConnell Jr., the Chief Justice of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island, told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace on Thursday. “It's also not an easy thing for us to come forward as judges, because you all work on... There is an unprecedented amount of personal attacks against judges — not just me, but all across the country. It's systematic, it's growing, it's severe. There are sustained efforts.”
He added, “There are, in my opinion, results of sustained efforts by high-level members of the executive branch who have called judges rogue, insurrectionists, radicals, haters, moneyed, lunatics, corrupt, vicious. And this constant personal attack on my fellow district judges and myself and our families is the beginning of the attack on equal justice under the law, according to the rule of law.”
He continued, “My story is not unique — it's disturbing, but it's not unique. I received six or seven credible death threats. My daughter was doxxed by Laura Loomer and by Elon Musk. I have a picture of myself on a wanted poster made by a congressman. Ethics complaints were filed against me, and some of the attacks were against my wife — certainly not a public figure. And so that level of personally attacking judges by a co-equal branch of government is detrimental to our democracy as we know it.”
He later told Wallace that this is not “a partisan issue.”
“We had Democratic members of the Senate speak inappropriately about judges, using deceptive language,” McConnell told Wallace. What we're seeing right now, out of the executive branch, appears to be an attempt to delegitimize the courts, to delegitimize judges. The Deputy Attorney General — who's potentially in line to be the Attorney General — said we're at war with the courts, and called people to action. These kinds of things are not acceptable in a democratic society when we follow the law.”
McConnell is not alone among jurists warning that Trump’s rhetoric against judges is meant to undermine the judiciary. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a similar comment in 2025.
“The attacks are not random,” Jackson said. “They seem designed to intimidate. The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.”
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