Perhaps I'm naive, but I never understood why a despotic US President would need all of these weapons and vehicles. I mean, they're a nice convenience, but they're complete unnecessary for a takeover.
My thought would be that you just need the presidency and maybe six high ranking military officers. You then declare a presidential address where you announce that you're declaring yourself dictator for life. If anyone objects, you'll nuke Moscow. Of course, Russia will respond by annihilating the entire US, so objecting to the take over is essentially a death sentence.
Let the citizens have their guns. They can't shoot an ICBM.
The problem is, the newly-appointed tyrant would need everyone in the military to play along with the blackmail. All it would take is a few rogue Air Force pilots to shoot down that ICBM.
Never underestimate the ability of human beings to go along with, and justify in their minds, a bad idea.
How does any tyrant do the things they do without enough people willing to go along with it?
Actually, your idea of rogue Air Force pilots shooting down an unscheduled launch of an ICBM is classic B-movie material. As long as there are three pilots and there's some love triangle sub-plot involved. Plus, one of them has to die in some meaningless and tragic way.
With magical patriot fuel that provides thrust relative to the amount of ridiculous drama that has thus far been painted on the stupid propaganda movie reel. Likely when the meaningless death of the goofy but loveable sidekick has been concluded somehow and the ex quarterback pilot jock is sufficiently despairing and enraged at the same time while his high school sweetheart is crying over said death in some sterile but tense government control room and he can hear her on comms as he spurts out his last gasp of impotent rage doing the actually impossible thing and making watching vaccuous halfwit proles feel proud to be American.
Queue complete bullshit speech by sufficiently aristocratic looking political figure about lessons hard learned and tests successfully overcome.
Someone has taken Iron Man saving NYC from a rogue nuke a bit too seriously. If only we could shoot down ICBMs with fighters, my favorite military vehicle, the aircraft carrier, would be far more prevalent in the world.
My thought would be that you just need the presidency and maybe six high ranking military officers. You then declare a presidential address where you announce that you're declaring yourself dictator for life. If anyone objects, you'll nuke Moscow. Of course, Russia will respond by annihilating the entire US, so objecting to the take over is essentially a death sentence.
Let the citizens have their guns. They can't shoot an ICBM.