You're right, it won't be. This is the only positive thing I can currently see. They could've easily pulled it off without resistance (i.e. bloodshed) in most of Europe, but in the US the indoctrination of US exceptionalism regarding "freedom" and "democracy" from an early age results in a non-negligible number of people who would actually put their lives on the line for this and willing to take part in active resistance.

Purely anecdotally from seeing a small part of military-adjacent tech, while most definitely voted for Trump and some of them will be MAGA-converts, most of them actually belived in that mission and won't be aligned with a proper dictatorship. They'll have to play it very carefully, keep elections but rig them just enough to make the outcome inevitable, to keep these people able to convince themselves it's still a democracy, boiling the frog very slowly. It might be preferable for them to actually accelerate things and go full Putin, there'll be a lot more active resistance that way.