The US is already essentially an ideological dictatorship.
The ruling class is comfortable with manipulation in the form of democracy: it successfully provides cover for the power of one caste through the change of its representatives. Trump is in many ways an exception, a fish from another aquarium, an outcast, which is why the whole neoliberal and left-wing radical army took up arms against him.
The convenience and provenance of a manipulative form of government make it unlikely and socially quasi-impossible to establish a direct dictatorship – it will not be accepted by the key players in the manipulation game, like the vast majority of the population. This is possible only in conditions of a catastrophic natural disaster that would threaten the very existence of the United States as a state and a nation, but not such an epidemic as Covid-19.
Alexey Pushkov