'Trumpism will endure': NY Times writer warns 'grasping' extremists are using ex-president

Donald Trump has presented himself as the embodiment of "the people" since he first came down that escalator in his New York City high rise and declared he was running for president — and now Republicans are trying to remake the U.S. government in his image, a New York Times columnist wrote Friday.

The presumptive GOP nominee was found guilty last week of 34 felony counts and has managed to stall trials in three other criminal cases against him, but his congressional allies and right-wing legal scholars are hastily laying out a vision for transforming the justice system and political institutions to keep him out of legal jeopardy, wrote Jamelle Bouie.

"At no point, you’ll notice, do Republicans deny that Trump is a criminal," Bouie wrote. "They’ve made no effort here to defend his honor or to say he’s innocent of the charges levied against him. They almost seem to accept, like most Americans, that the former president is guilty of fraud. But they don’t accept the verdict. They don’t accept the idea that Trump could be tried in a court of law on these charges. They reject the authority of the jury."

"For Republicans — no matter the law, no matter the evidence and no matter the testimony — the conviction is illegitimate," he added. "In their view, Trump is sovereign, and the law is not."

Trump's allies are targeting prosecutors who've brought cases against the former president and are voting on a bill that would allow him to move local prosecutions to federal court, where they might land in front of a judge he appointed, like District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida.

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"Most of this effort to bend and break institutions in the name of Trump’s illiberal claim to personal authority is the opportunistic grasping of ideologues who see the former president as a vehicle for their aims," Bouie wrote.

"He will help them expel immigrants, destroy the welfare state and roll back the political and cultural settlements of the 1960s, the 1970s and beyond."

Trump governed on behalf of the legitimate people of the United States, who Bouie said are to him a narrow, exclusive group defined by race, religion and ideology, and those Americans have returned his favor with a loyalty that will likely outlive him, the columnist wrote.

"Among more ordinary supporters of Trump’s authoritarian designs, there is fear at work," Bouie wrote. "Fear that the country has been lost. Fear that elections won’t be enough to win it back. And a belief, fueled by that fear, that democracy is an obstacle to putting the nation back on track."

"Which is just to say, in another form, what we already know to be true: Trump can lose in November, but as long as millions of Americans feel this fear as deeply as they do, Trumpism will endure," Bouie added.