The reasons he didn't become a dictator are many: he was incompetent and lazy, he surrounded himself with boot licking incompetents and grifters, he couldn't game the system enough to twist it into a dictatorship because he didn't know the system and most importantly - he got a lot of push back from everyone else.

What's frightening is that if was competent and hired sophisticated and competent people - I'd be in a camp starving to death.