The regime of Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi exhibits a deeper form of authoritarianism than the Mubarak regime. It has engaged in more extensive and brutal repression and has adopted legal changes that further restrict civil and political rights. This paper develops a causal argument for why these changes occurred by utilizing Sheena Greitens’ theoretical framework, which emphasizes the importance of analyzing the dominant threat to the founding autocrat when he first assumes power. The paper examines the formation of the Nasser regime and finds that the dominant threat faced by Nasser emanated from other parts of the elite, particularly from the military and security apparatus. As a consequence, Nasser created a highly fragmented set of coercive and political institutions with overlapping missions. Politics was grounded in a balancing among the military, the Ministry of Interior (MOI), and the ruling party (initially the ASU). This fragmented structure ensured that no single institution could overthrow Nasser. However, this fragmented structure created incentives for high levels of violence due to the resulting limits on quality of intelligence that the apparatus could gather, restrictions on the free flow of information among security organizations, and competition among these organizations to demonstrate their repressive capabilities. The paper shows that this structure remained largely intact throughout the Sadat and Mubarak eras. The paper argues that the uprising of 2011 led to a change in the dominant threat posed to Egypt’s ruler, from an elite threat -- which had prevailed since the regime’s founding in 1952 -- to a mass threat, which was manifest in the scale of the public demonstrations in 2011 and compounded by the rise of an insurgency in Sinai and the flow of weapons and fighters across the Libyan border that supported popular opposition. The shift to a mass threat contributed to an end to politics grounded in a balancing among the military, the Ministry of Interior (MOI), and the ruling party. Instead, the military emerged as the dominant institution. However, the deeply-rooted fragmented structure of the Ministry of Interior persisted. Egypt is left with a military-dominated regime and a Ministry of Interior that faces strong structural incentives to engage in ever-higher levels of violence. The paper utilizes a variety of sources including accounts by key actors as conveyed in speeches, interviews, and memoirs; laws governing coercive and political institutions; relevant newspaper and other accounts; and relevant secondary literature in Arabic and English.