Legal experts say Donald Trump’s remark urging the public to “look where” the judge in his Manhattan criminal trial “comes from” is the latest instance of the former president working to delegitimize the judiciary while relying on the specter of racism and xenophobia.

As he left the Manhattan courthouse Tuesday, Trump told reporters that Judge Juan Merchan "hates" him.

“Just take a look,” Trump said. “Take a look at him. Take a look at where he comes from. He can’t stand Donald Trump. He’s doing everything in his power.”

Stephen Burbank, emeritus professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, said Trump’s comments are reflective of his tactic of trying to inflame his base and the wider public with "racism" and "phobia."

“‘Take a look at where he comes from’ of course raises again the specter of racism, phobia, a phobia about people of Hispanic origins,” Burbank said. “Simply by the name of a judge it appears he assumed that he would be anti-Trump.”

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“He’s doing everything in his power to provide a fair trial to Mr. Trump,” Burbank said. “It’s really quite repulsive, in my view.”

Merchan, who was born in Colombia and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of six, is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial, where he faces a potential four-year prison sentence if found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsification of business records.

Charles Geyh, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, said Trump’s comments on the judge are aimed at urging his supporters to believe the prosecution is political and sowing distrust in the American justice system.

“What he's doing here is, in effect, trying to discredit the court as a way to maintain his constituency and preserve their confidence in him by by discrediting the court,” Geyh said. “If and when he loses his case, he can blame the judge, blame the court proceeding, blame the state judiciary, blame the administration of justice that has fallen into liberal hands and so on. That's what I think is going on here, certainly. The business of trying to delegitimize every judiciary, or every court that has his ruling against him is a pattern that........

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