It was a warm, late May afternoon in 2024 in lower Manhattan. The jury in Donald Trump’s trial over hush money paid by his former lawyer to adult film star Stormy Daniels was out deliberating for a second day.
Assuming we were in for a long wait, I took myself off to lunch with the BBC team at the world-famous Katz’s deli for a Reuben sandwich.
Then all hell broke loose. The jury was returning.
According to one rumour, they were just being sent home for the day; another suggested there was a verdict.
Seconds before the BBC News at Ten went on air, I arrived breathless at the live television point outside the courthouse, smashing my phone screen on the pavement in my hurry.
One by one, the verdicts filtered through: guilty… guilty… guilty… it went on.
All 34 charges came back guilty, and I spent that night’s main news bulletin explaining the enormity of the idea that a former president was now a convicted felon – a first in US history.
As the BBC’s senior North America correspondent, I’d spent months covering the multitude of Trump’s legal problems in courts up and down the East Coast. Four separate criminal cases; several civil actions; it was coming at him from all sides, threatening not just his liberty but his whole political and commercial existence.
Spool on a year, and the boot is thoroughly on the other foot.
Three major Supreme Court judgments – one giving presidents and former presidents broad immunity from prosecution; a second dismissing the ruling that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results disqualified him from running for office again; and a third, just last month, curbing district judges’ abilities to stall the president’s agenda – have all emboldened this president who, having reshaped the Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority, now has the lower courts in his sights.
Those federal district judges – who had often made rulings on immigration policy that they said applied nationwide – are now facing a full-frontal onslaught from an administration that has questioned their legitimacy, and some say flouted their very authority.
The question is, should they fight back to reassert their authority – and if so, how can they? And will this all permanently reshape the balance of powers in the US, even after Donald Trump’s term ends?
‘The gravest assault on democracy’
Several judges – both active and retired – have told me that the scale of the “attack” is like nothing seen before.
John E Jones III, a former judge in Pennsylvania, appointed by a Republican president, and now president of Dickinson College, said: “I think it’s fair to say that in particular, the US district courts… [are] under attack by the administration in a way that is unprecedented.”
As well has his colourful remarks to me on the phone during our recent interview, the US President has variously called judges “crooked”, “monsters”, “deranged”, “lunatics”, “USA hating”, and “radical left”.
He has also called for the impeachment of those he disagrees with. And there have been threats to sue judges too.
His deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, has been even more forthright, declaring that the country is living under a judicial tyranny.
“Each day, they change the foreign policy, economic, staffing, and national security policies of the administration,” he posted on the social media site X in March. “It is madness. It is lunacy. It is pure lawlessness.
“It is the gravest assault on democracy. It must and will end.”
From death threats to doxxing
Judges have faced growing hostility, and in some cases threats of violence from the public.
“[They] are facing threats that they never have faced before,” says Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who now teaches at Harvard Law School. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton and spent 17 years on the federal bench in Massachusetts.
“There’s no question that the kind of opprobrium that the administration heaps on judges with whom they disagree is unlike any other time.”
Judge Gertner says she knows of serving judges who have received death threats this year that are understood to have been prompted by their blocking or delaying some of the president’s executive orders.
There is no suggestion that Trump had any knowledge of the threats.
Figures compiled by the US Marshals Service, which is tasked with protecting the judiciary, show that, to mid-June, there were more than 400 threats against almost 300 judges – surpassing the totals for the entire year of 2022.
Some of the threats involve doxxing – the publication of personal information about the person or their family, which risks opening them up to attack.
Other forms of intimidation this year have been more sinister still.
According to Esther Salas, a serving district judge in New Jersey, more than 100 judges have been subjected to fake pizza delivery orders.
No big deal, you might think, but the deliveries are often accompanied with threats and in around 20 cases, the orders were placed by people who used the name Daniel Anderl, Judge Salas’s late son.
He was killed five years ago by a disgruntled lawyer from a case heard by his mother. The assailant, who also shot her husband, had posed as a pizza delivery man.
Judge Salas told me of her reaction to hearing what was going on: “To say that I was angry is an understatement. And then of course, to have come home and tell my husband who nearly [died].”
The rise in threats began before the current administration but Judge Salas says we are in new territory now. “We are inviting individuals to do us harm when inflammatory rhetoric [is used],” she claims.
“That is giving a green light to anyone who thinks they may need to take things into their own hands. And our leaders know that.”
Many supporters of the current administration including Jeff Anderson, one of the architects of the Project 2025 program (which many saw as a blueprint for Trump’s second term), reject the idea that presidential rhetoric is to blame for raising the temperature.