The regime cultivates a chauvinistic nationalism intended to increase its legitimacy, but at the same time is dependent on financial support from regional allies. When one of those allies, Saudi Arabia, demands the settlement of a land dispute through the transfer of islands in the Red Sea, the government acquiesces — prompting thousands of Egyptians to take to the streets in anger. The regime promises social justice but presides over an economy in which inflation is rampant, austerity is biting and living standards plummeting.

The regime insists its curtailing of democratic freedoms is necessary because of a war against radical Islamists, but security lapses continue and the perpetual need to conjure up fresh demons means that some of the most popular figures in the country — most recently the soccer legend Mohamed Aboutrika — end up on the terrorist watch list. The regime attempts to prove to the international community that it is open for business, but then flounders in a morass of conspiracy theories when the body of Giulio Regeni, a young Italian Ph.D. student, is found on the side of a highway, his nails and skin marked with signs of torture.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Sisi is reigning over the ashes of a broken political order; more so than Mr. Trump, however, he is a creature of that broken order and incapable of articulating the new. Egypt’s younger generation, weaned on television images of barricades and tear gas, and veterans of their own personal battles with patriarchs in the classroom, mosque, factory floor and family dining room, do not accept the status quo as immutable.

“The future now seems very vague and foggy,” a young activist named Tarek Hussein told me late last year, “but we won’t abandon the fight to make it our own.” Mr. Hussein’s peers live out Egypt’s paradoxes on a daily basis: He was incarcerated under the former Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, for allegedly opposing the government, and then again under Mr. Sisi for allegedly being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. I met him in a downtown Cairo cafe in the company of his younger brother, Mahmoud, who as a teenager spent more than 700 days imprisoned without charge for the crime of wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Nation without torture.”

“When I was eventually released, they told me I should go home and keep quiet,” Mahmoud said. “But here I am.”

Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of what appeared to be a police informant, listening in and occasionally muttering into a phone. Tarek and Mahmoud, used to navigating the complexities of Mr. Sisi’s Egypt, deftly steered us outside so that we could continue talking elsewhere. The future they want to create is irreconcilable with the one represented by the police informant, and the system that sponsors him; the future Egyptian capital in the Eastern Desert, with its neatly demarcated segments of conventional authority and V.I.P. parking for those with private helicopters, is incompatible with the messy, contested Cairo from which the Hussein brothers have emerged.