Adaptation Displacement: Hardly anyone even remembers that this was adapted from a novel credited to an Anonymous Author, though it was eventually revealed to be Thomas F. Tweed, a former English military officer and adviser to David Lloyd George. An unpublished draft somehow found its way into the hands of William Randolph Hearst who immediately bankrolled a film version that was released around the same time as the book.
Aluminum Christmas Trees: Bizarre or horrific as this may seen, it's not just the film which thinks a dictatorship was a good idea. Many political observers in 1933 felt the only way to end the Depression was for the President to declare emergency powers and essentially take over the government. William Randolph Hearst (as the foremost media owner then) had funded it in part because he was on-board with that idea (and also as a way to influence politics after his own unsuccessful attempts at running for office), while even Franklin D. Roosevelt felt the film would "do much to help" him. There was a movement briefly to have a Roosevelt dictatorship and FDR's Vice President John Nance Garner even backed comprehensive emergency legislation that would have given him sweeping power over the executive branch (the proposal was rejected immediately). That said, the film was still quite controversial even in its day (the fact that it was based on a novel by a retired British colonel who'd never been to America didn't exactly help its case), and the rise of fascism in Europe in the months after the film's release quickly stamped out any major American enthusiasm for a strong-armed presidency.
Designated Hero: It's a story about a president turning the United States into a dictatorship... and this is presented as a good thing.
Fridge Horror: Hammond consolidated all power in himself, overthrew the Constitution (and democracy with it), and then died with no clear successor. The odds of his system surviving for any length of time before collapsing and negatively affecting the country are not high.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: A very literal case, since, to the surprise of nobody, it was a big financial and critical success in the early days of Nazi Germany, where it was celebrated as an endorsement of fascism.
The scene where President Hammond demonstrates the ability of airplanes to bomb and sink battleships is reminiscent of Pearl Harbor, which occurred 8 years after the film was made.
Hammond's police state with one dictator at the head comes off as foreshadowing a certain other infamous government (it was openly compared to Fascist Italy, as that already existed at the time).
The prospect of a President seizing unlimited power to solve the problems of the country, including executing his enemies via military tribunal was a central tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory that arose under Donald Trump.
Unintentional Period Piece: Let's just say a movie where the President creates a private police force, becomes dictator, abolishes the Constitution, and builds America into an empire could not have depicted him as a hero after World War II.
Values Dissonance: The fact that a US President becoming dictator could be portrayed as good and right is a sign of the times, when some thought this could be a solution to America's problems then. Open admiration for Mussolini and later even Hitler (or Stalin) remained fairly mainstream up until World War II or the Cold War.
and FDR's Vice President John Nance Garner even backed comprehensive emergency legislation that would have given him sweeping power over the executive branch (the proposal was rejected immediately). That said, the film was still quite controversial even in its day (the fact that it was based on a novel by a retired British colonel who'd never been to America didn't exactly help its case), and the rise of fascism in Europe in the months after the film's release quickly stamped out any major American enthusiasm for a strong-armed presidency.