In recent weeks, federal judges across the country have blocked several of President Donald Trump’s more ambitious attempts to treat following the law as optional. Elon Musk, who is leading the administration’s efforts to cut government spending, people, and spending on people, has responded as he is wont to do: by posting incessantly, calling for the impeachment of “fake,” “corrupt,” “activist” judges for “violating the will of the people.” His timeline on X, the social media app he ruined, is littered with conspiratorial screeds about the dastardly ulterior motives that these judges must have had for preventing an unelected billionaire from assuming the power of the legislative and executive branches all for himself.
On February 10, after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the reinstatement of the head of a federal whistleblower protection agency whom Trump tried to remove from office, an irate Musk tweeted that “democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup.” As is always the case when conservatives employ such terms, Musk’s working definition of an “activist” judge encompasses any judge who does something he does not like.
No judge has been subjected to more of Musk’s vitriol than Judge Amir Ali, a Biden appointee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who recently set a deadline for the White House to release illegally-withheld funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development. (On Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily paused Ali’s order to give the Trump administration time to respond.) “Impeach Ali!” Musk wrote, replying to a tweet that identified Ali, in time-honored dog-whistling fashion, as “39-year-old Canadian-born Amir Hatem Mahdy Ali, the first Muslim and Arab DC judge.” Another Musk tweet quoted with approval a conservative media personality who called Ali a “dual citizen” who must be “impeached and investigated” for “stopping the President from cutting fraudulent spending.”
In still another tweet, Musk veered even further into unvarnished racism and smirking xenophobia. “Tragic that Amir Ali could have been writing software instead of forcing taxpayers to fund bogus NGOs,” he wrote. “He’s another victim of the woke mind virus.”
Tragic that Amir Ali could have been writing software instead of forcing taxpayers to fund bogus NGOs.
He’s another victim of the woke mind virus.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 25, 2025
A chorus of blue-check agitators have since latched on to Musk’s rhetoric, gleefully workshopping different combinations of words, images, and bigotry in an effort to rocket to the top of the “For You” tab. (I am going to spare you specific examples, but on a right-wing media platform that functions as a megaphone for Musk’s ideological agenda, you can probably guess how ugly the replies to these tweets get.) For conservatives, pushing transparent Islamophobic smear campaigns has been a particularly fruitful judicial politics strategy in recent months. The handles running this same playbook against Ali are not random egg avatars with single-digit follower counts; they are right-wing influencers with huge audiences who are churning out content that they know will earn the attention they crave.
As of this writing, Musk hasn’t tweeted about Loren AliKhan, a Biden-appointed district court judge who recently blocked the White House’s “freeze” on federal funding. But plenty of pseudonymous accounts paying for an algorithmic boost on X are attacking her anyway, for the same despicable reasons they consider the idea of a federal judge named Amir Ali to be a national scandal. Given that many of these tweets have racked up millions of views already, I am guessing it is a matter of time before Musk has something vile to say about her as well.
(Photo by Valerie Plesch for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Over the past few years, Republicans have frequently accused Democrats who criticize court rulings of fomenting violence against the judges who issue them. In 2020, after then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted in a floor speech that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would “pay the price” for “these awful decisions,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was incensed. “The minority leader of the United States Senate threatened two associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Period. There’s no other way to interpret that,” McConnell said, an assertion that will be surprising to anyone with a passing familiarity with Senate floor speeches or Chuck Schumer. Whatever the speaker’s intention, McConnell continued, “words carrying the apparent threat of violence can have horrific unintended consequences.”
Now, as Musk whips a movement with a very recent history of political violence into a conspiracy theory-fueled frenzy about treasonous judges walking among us, Republican elected officials are, if anything, egging him on. Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles has introduced articles of impeachment against Ali, whom Ogles calls a “partisan hack” with a history of “advocating for far-Left radicalism,” and has threatened the same against Judge John Bates, whom Ogles calls a “rogue, woke activist.” Before this, Ogles was best known for floating a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run for a third term; a week later, federal prosecutors dropped a criminal investigation against him without explanation.
During an “impeachathon” livestream on Wednesday, Ogles and two colleagues announced their intent to initiate proceedings against several other judges who had the temerity to enforce laws the Trump administration finds inconvenient. (One participating lawmaker made sure to thank Musk for “taking all kinds of slings and arrows for the American people.”) Utah Senator Mike Lee has also flirted with supporting impeachments, which earned him the most valuable currency in conservative media: an approving quote-tweet from Musk, who called for “some repercussions above ZERO for judges who make truly terrible decisions.”
These stunts are unlikely to result in the defenestration of Ali or anyone else anytime soon. Impeachment, as you may remember from the first Trump administration (twice), requires a majority vote in the House, and conviction and removal from office requires a two-thirds supermajority vote in the Senate. No federal judge has been impeached since Louisiana district court judge Thomas Porteous, who took bribes from lawyers working cases on his docket, in 2010. As cooked as the brains of many Republicans may be, I doubt that enough of the caucus, at least for now, is ready to reset the clock over a handful of temporary injunctions.
I really do not like talking about Musk, a venal, sweaty try-hard who is decomposing before our very eyes, or about X, a rudderless ghost town propped up by engagement-farming porn bots trying to get you to divulge your Social Security number via unencrypted DM. But as I’ve written elsewhere, what happens on X unfortunately matters in the real world, because X is the only source of information for the man who now sets the Republican Party agenda, one post at a time. Even if the impeachments he’s inspired go nowhere, by maligning judges with whom he disagrees as illegitimate and un-American, Musk is leveraging gutter racism to build support among conservatives for the Trump administration to ignore court orders that stand in its way. It is immaterial to him that normal people find this abhorrent; the audience of lemmings who lap up his tweets is the only one he cares about.
