Still Contested. The Charge Is What Grew.

The Formulation, Seven Weeks On

On 9 September this publication ran Nineteen Months, one continuous account of the period from 20 January 2025 to 26 August 2026. It ended on a sentence I still defend: competitive authoritarian consolidation, carrying a real fascist charge, still contested, and not yet consummated. It also left a watch list, led by whether court orders bind and what happens to the ballot machinery.¹

This week is the cleanest test of that sentence so far. The Pentagon said it will livestream a firing squad.² The president agreed to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin.³ The Justice Department opened an antitrust investigation into the television networks that had paused White House pool coverage.⁴ And on Monday morning, agents from the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement searched the Washington home of Representative Ilhan Omar, 22 days before an election.⁵

My argument is that the formulation holds, and that its second clause is the one moving. The contest is still real. The Senate map says so, and so did two federal judges this week. What grew this week is the charge. The place where the two meet is the search of a sitting opposition legislator's home, three weeks before voters decide whether the tilt becomes permanent.

Why the Label Is Competitive Authoritarianism

Nineteen Months made the case that the diagnosis is a practical question, because different diagnoses imply different strategies. If this were fascism in the classical sense, elections would be theater. If it is competitive authoritarianism, elections are real and the whole fight is over the tilt: the opposition can win, and it pays costs the incumbent never pays.¹The past week reads like that definition being applied in the final weeks of a campaign.

Start with state resources. The president announced $90 payments to more than 20 million Medicare Part B enrollees,⁶ and at least $1.5 million in federal money paid for television advertisements promoting him personally.⁷ Politico has reported a Customs and Border Protection filing that describes a $20 million purchase order behind those ads. The administration has since told a federal judge they aired for the last time and asked that the lawsuits be dismissed as moot, which Common Cause calls running out the clock.⁸

Then the referees. The president created a committee of inquiry into Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, with a closed White House hearing set for 5 November, two days after the vote.⁹ An internal Justice Department memo exempts Senate-confirmed appointees from the stricter limits on political activity that bind other senior officials, and the Attorney General has already introduced the president at a Senate campaign rally.¹⁰ The press got an antitrust investigation for a collective editorial decision.⁴ And the federal immigration database is being run against voter rolls, which Homeland Security says election officials in 25 states have done.¹¹

Now the other half of the definition. The Cook Political Report moved three Senate races toward Democrats, including Kansas.¹² A Reuters review found candidates seeking distance from the president in 41 of 62 competitive races.¹³ His approval stands at 32 percent in Reuters/Ipsos polling.¹⁴ The races being competitive does not count against the label. It is part of what the label means: an opposition that can win, facing a state that makes it pay for trying.

Monday Morning in Washington

Here is what the record holds. Agents with Homeland Security Investigations carried boxes from Omar's home to an unmarked car.¹⁵ The Justice Department says the search is "part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation."⁵ According to the New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett, speaking to PBS NewsHour, the probe centers on the paperwork through which her family became citizens, including forms her father filled out, and investigators are looking at false statements, fraud and conspiracy. Barrett also reports that a judge did not approve the warrant right away, after back-and-forth over the legal arguments.¹⁵ No charge has been filed.¹⁶ Omar has been a citizen since 2000.¹⁷

I do not know what the investigation will find, and nothing in this argument depends on it. The argument is about the instrument and the calendar. The instrument is the investigative arm of the immigration agency, pointed at a member of Congress over whether she belongs. The calendar is 22 days before an election, inside the window where, as Barrett noted, the Justice Department has for many years followed what is known as a 60-day rule against overt investigative steps.¹⁵

The target has a history in this record. This spring, Vice President JD Vance said Omar "definitely committed immigration fraud," an accusation and not a finding.¹⁵ In January, a man sprayed a substance at her during a town hall in Minneapolis, in the same month federal agents killed two US citizens.¹⁸ She has described herself, at a Capitol Hill rally NPR reported in 2019, as "a refugee, a black woman, an immigrant, a Muslim."¹⁹ A search built on her family's citizenship forms reads, to me, as the clearest statement yet of the hierarchy Nineteen Months described: who counts as an American is being decided by the agency that deports people.¹

The Intercept's Natasha Lennard called the search a fascist move in a signed column.²⁰ I would put it more narrowly, and I think the narrow version is harder to dismiss. Pointing enforcement at an opposition legislator in the last weeks of a campaign is a defining move of competitive authoritarianism. It is how a tilted field becomes a closed one, and whether it works depends on what courts and voters do with it before 3 November.

The Charge

Nineteen Months refused to file the fascist elements under mere authoritarianism, and named several, among them internal enemies designated by belief rather than conduct, political violence pardoned in one direction and prosecuted as terrorism in the other, and an aestheticized cult of the leader.¹ This week added weight to the first and the last, and showed a working method underneath both.

Enemies by belief first. In Minneapolis, fifteen anti-ICE activists face a 94-page federal conspiracy indictment over protests last winter. Court filings show Homeland Security Investigations agents infiltrated unions and nonprofits and subpoenaed financial records from the Service Employees International Union and the Communications Workers of America, hunting for the financiers of what a presidential memorandum, NSPM-7, labels left-wing terrorism. When reporters asked in June, the U.S. attorney could not name a single injured federal officer.[21] In Arizona, Border Patrol raided a 70-day protest camp at Lochiel during a morning prayer ceremony, arrested at least 10 people and cut down a 200-year-old cottonwood while, a journalist on scene reported, a person was still in its branches.²¹ On the Tohono O'odham Nation, tribal members keeping a prayer fire logged more than 1,000 sightings of drones, aircraft, unmarked vehicles and agents photographing them.²²

Then the spectacle. The firing squad that will kill Nidal Hasan is set for 3 December at Fort Hood, and Pete Hegseth said: "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public." Asked whether Hasan had made final requests, he answered: "Don't care."² The last public execution in the United States was in 1936.²³ Earlier in the week, at a rally in Nebraska, the president said of Iran: let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego.²⁴ Walter Benjamin's line was that fascism aestheticizes politics. A death staged for an audience, and two American cities offered up as a rally line, are what that looks like in practice.

Underneath both is the exception. Congress explicitly banned Russian energy imports in 2022.²⁵ The Treasury met the diesel deal with a general license under which US sanctions will not apply until April 2027 to Russian diesel already loaded onto tankers, while a bipartisan law directs the administration to target the top importers of Russian oil and gas.³Senator Thom Tillis said there is a legitimate case for saying the president is not following the law.²⁵ On the Tohono O'odham Nation, a judge denied the tribe an injunction while saying he fully expected the government to consult it, and a week later Homeland Security waived more than 30 laws, the tribal consultation requirements among them.²² The ethics memo is the same instrument turned inward.¹⁰ So is the livestream, which the Army rules governing military executions do not mention.²⁶ Carl Schmitt, the jurist who went on to serve the Nazi state, wrote that sovereign is he who decides on the exception. One reading of this week is that the waiver, the license and the exemption have become the ordinary way this government works, and that the ordinary law is now the thing that needs a special reason to apply.

Hours after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Navi Pillay, a former judge of the International Criminal Court,²⁷ the United States sanctioned that court as an institution, not only its officials.²⁸ The 10 October edition said it plainly, and I will repeat it: a government sanctioning the court that might judge it is a separate fact, and it would be the same fact whichever government did it.²⁹ That standard is why India's crackdown on voter-roll protests in Delhi³⁰ and Pakistan's suspension of the provincial government run by Imran Khan's party belong in the same column.³¹ What I am describing is a regime type, and the United States is not exempt from it.

What Still Binds

The first item on the Nineteen Months watch list was whether court orders bind, not whether they are issued.¹ In the past two weeks some did. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled against the Justice Department's collection of unredacted state voter rolls in a 78-page opinion. She wrote that behind the window dressing this was the federal government trying to decide who gets to vote, and her ruling reaches the states that had already handed theirs over.³² Judge Kathleen Cardone froze new wall construction in and around Big Bend.³³ A federal judge blocked the deportation of the man an immigration agent shot in his car in Marble Hill, with his five-year-old son in the back seat.³⁴ Even the Omar warrant was not approved right away, by Barrett's account.¹⁵

The defections were real too. Republican senators Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis and John Curtis broke publicly with the livestream,³⁵ and the vice president said he would not watch it and expressed doubt that it would happen.²⁶ Six senators, four of them Republicans, demanded that the diesel deal be reversed.²⁵ In Minneapolis, hundreds of union members marched behind the fifteen defendants, and none has taken a plea.³⁶ That is what the competitive half of the term looks like at ground level.

It comes with a warning. The election law scholar Richard Hasen counts real guardrails holding this year.³⁷ Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the New York Times, argues that the Supreme Court's approval of the voter database is limited for now by a 90-day rule that lapses once this election passes, which on his reading leaves bulk searches available in 2028.³⁸ The 6 October edition put the consequence in one line: the guardrail held and left a map.³⁹ A side that keeps losing in court is also learning which methods survive there.

The Strongest Objection

The best case against this piece comes from the left, and I take it seriously because it is the structural one. Jacobin has argued that asylum was dismantled across five presidencies, not one.⁴⁰ In Vermont, the state attorney general, a Democrat, charged thirteen anti-ICE activists after state police went around a county prosecutor who had declined to.⁴¹ If the machinery was built by both parties and is still being run by both, a label pinned to one administration risks letting the prior order off the hook.

I concede the premise. The apparatus is older than this presidency, and a record that pretended otherwise would deserve to be ignored. What is new is the direction it is pointed. In the final weeks of a campaign it is aimed at the electoral field itself: the opposition's legislators, the press pool, the voter rolls and the central bank's independence.

The second objection is one Nineteen Months raised against itself. Fascism historically broke the political independence of the existing capitalist class, and this government has fused with it instead.¹ The week bears that out. A 120-day review of the future of warfare is co-led by men whose companies hold major Pentagon contracts.⁴² That is the reason I keep the noun as competitive authoritarianism and the fascism as a charge. The third objection is the simplest: a word used every week stops warning anyone. The answer to that is discipline. Name each element with its date and its footnote, and leave the reader the conclusion the record supports.

Twenty-One Days

Nineteen Months closed on Hungary, where sixteen years of this playbook broke in one election on 78 percent turnout, and on the warning that the midterms cannot restore what has been removed. What they can decide is whether the tilt becomes permanent.¹ Seven weeks later I would sharpen that only slightly. The contest is still open, and that is not a comfort. It means the next three weeks are where the remaining tilt gets applied, and the record now shows what that looks like at close range.

The dates are fixed. Whether prosecutors take the Omar case to a grand jury before 3 November is the first thing to watch. The closed hearing on Lisa Cook is 5 November.⁹ The firing squad is 3 December.² By then we will know whether this was a contest that the incumbent tilted and lost, or the week the tilt stopped being a tilt.