I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
Your main point is valid, but I'd argue it's less the power of the President and more the two-party system and the weakness of Congress that is the root of many American governance problems. Executive power has grown in the vacuum of Congressional impotence.
As far as reforms, we need more to be sure, but there's at least the 22nd Amendment, formalizing the two-term tradition that Washington initiated and FDR abrogated into a hard limit, that means Trump can't legally keep power past 2028.
>The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
What a poorly thought out and questionably motivated take. It will no doubt be well received here.
In any case, reconstructing out legislature to copy european stuff isn't gonna change anything if the legislature still sees fit to vest so much power in the executive.