Napoleon as a US President

ITTL, it gets to be much earlier and less traumatic than that. The USA acquires control, in one form or another, over North America and northern South America since the end of the wars of independence. Political details may vary depending on the various areas' levels of settlement and stability, but the final path is to US statehood (except for the scarcely habitable areas) within a few decades. The unsettled lands that are inhabitated only by 'wild' natives become US Territories for a while, until settlement makes them fit for statehood, as usual. This is not really different from OTL, except ITTL the Frontier spans from the Big North to northern Mexico and a greater American investment in infrastructure development and a standing military makes the it advance and statehood occur faster than OTL: say one decade or two earlier than OTL for many OTL US states, at the same pace as neighbor OTL US states for Canadian and Mexican states. The areas that already have a sizable population of settlers or Europeanized natives may get statehood fairly soon (a few years at most) after US annexation, or go through a slightly longer preliminary stage as US protectorates/associated states/client republics that may typically last 1-3 decades. The choice depends on their initial political stability, size, distance from established US states, socio-economic development, infrastructure, and so on.

This means that just like the rest of settled US Spanish America, by the time the folks in Washington start planning and building the transoceanic canal(s), Central America has been US land for decades, and either already a series of US states for some time or close to become so. Besides the USA's bigger size, power, and wealth, this is another reason these canals get built more or less as soon as technology would afford and emergent need would require. The USA do these as domestic infrastructure projects on their own land, just like building the intercontinental railways, they don't have to negotiate anything about them with foreign governments.

  Almost certainly the latter.  Eurofed gravitates toward autocratic continental empires and if he's suggesting an empire conquering across the Pacific as he is on another site on this issue he's not going to let a potential rival exist in the Americas.

  That depends on who you ask.   I would suspect not but Eurofed would argue otherwise.  If you haven't guessed we're on opposite ends of the spectrum on this issue and have clashed often in the past on the issue of mega-states and individual freedom.

  Frankly I suspect Napoleon would end up overthrown as he was in Europe.  The young US, while deeply imperialistic was also strongly opposed to centralised government and a lot weaker than France in terms of prolonged wars of expansion.  It took them a couple of decades to crush the Indians of the old NW, with numerous defeats on the way. 

  Even if somehow it didn't collapse the prolonged rapid expansion is extremely unlikely.  In a state which still drew more of its core identity from English values and law and as late as 1960 was seeing questions on the viability of a Catholic being elected President I doubt you would see the willingness to become a majority Catholic/Latino nation by ~1900 at the latest.

  I suspect that even if he's pretty successful both in controlling the country and aggressive military expansion, people will weary of him and want change.  Even apart from all the problems in terms of debts, high military spending, government interference in people's lives and disruption of foreign trade that are a probably result of such policies.  As such he's likely to be voted out after at most 3-4 terms.  If he then seeks to impose a dictatorship, which he might do in such a society, then he could well last longer but sooner or later he will be overthrown or the country torn in civil war. 

  If he proves greatly different to OTL Napoleon and does step down when voted out then a lot of his legacy will probably survive, for better or worse.