Certainly it's possible that could happen to us. If it does I fully expect to have elections throughout the process.
We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.
We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.
> no mechanism in the constitution for canceling elections
Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
I agree. Stability of a system is not so much about whether there is some mechanism or force that wants to push it away from equilibrium (because there probably is some such perturber outside of a perfectly controlled environment), but stability is more about whether there exists a stabilizing mechanism to bring the system back toward equilibrium after it starts to deviate.
Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.
They may be, but if there are no elections, there is no United States. Constitutionally, its government is predicated on having elected representatives.
I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
The two concepts are not exclusive. You could have "elections" but with heavy ICE presence at the polls "to guarantee security", effectively ensuring only the "right kind of people" will vote. That's not free elections.
If so, why do you think this is not relevant to this particular empire at this particular time?