The trick to tautocracy is that there are enough rules to go around that you can always pick which one is the important one. This is why Mitch McConnell is the most powerful politician of our era.
....The result is government by ever-deepening cynicism and technicality, freely ignoring the content of the original rules, let alone their purpose. News reporters blandly write that a measure didn’t get the 60 votes it needed to pass the Senate. The House declines to look into whether foreign governments making large cash payments to the president’s personal businesses would violate the Emoluments Clause. The Georgia Secretary of State supervises, and purges tens or hundreds of thousands of voters from, the election in which he himself is running for governor, because there’s nothing that says he can’t.