America’s newly elected president may be a demagogue and a populist, but what he is above all is a revolutionary.

In hoping to make America great again, Donald Trump promises to introduce a fundamental, comprehensive and rapid transformation of American political, economic, social and cultural institutions. Such a massive change is what we mean by the term “revolution.”

In that sense, Trump is comparable to, and in the same category as, such revolutionaries as Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong. This comparison isn’t intended to imply that their revolutionary programs are identical. It’s only to say that their programs aspire to fundamental, comprehensive and rapid change.

Like all revolutionaries, President Trump will quickly come to face what the German American political scientist Otto Kirchheimer called “confining conditions.”

According to Kirchheimer, confining conditions are “the particular social and intellectual conditions present at the births of [revolutionary] regimes.” These are the conditions “that have to be overcome if the new regime is to continue.” They include “social structure; the nature of the new regime; and the nature of the methods available to it, as well as those it adopts to overcome the confining conditions.”

When revolutionary regimes encounter confining conditions, they can either engage in “revolutionary breakthroughs” and thereby survive, or fail to do so and peter out or collapse.

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