Even before he won the presidency, Donald J. Trump had a strong claim to being the most ideologically disruptive presidential nominee of modern times. From the Bush family to Paul Ryan, the Iraq war to entitlement reform, Trump arrayed himself against the personalities and policies of the Republican Party, and his campaign took a wrecking ball to many of his adopted party’s orthodoxies, proposing a vision of right-wing politics far more mercantilist, nationalist and statist than anything we’ve seen from the post-Reagan, post-Goldwater G.O.P.

His primary campaign proved that this vision is popular with Republican voters, and his shocking general election win suggests that Trumpism might be more politically potent than the conservatism it overthrew. But his revolution was so sudden and sweeping that it raced ahead of itself, capturing the White House without having any of the plans and personnel and foot soldiers that actually operationalizing Trumpism would require.

Every administration tends to have ideological divisions, to rely on an old guard of party people (moderate Republicans in the Reagan era, Clintonites in the Obama presidency) alongside its newcomers, innovators and ideological insurgents. But in this case, apart from the infamous-but-still-marginal alt-right and the small clutch of conservative intellectuals for Trump (most of whom don’t agree on what being “for Trump” means), there is really no Trumpist new guard at all, at least among the people qualified to staff a presidential administration — no roster of elected officials who rose to power promising to Make America Great Again, no list of policy thinkers who have spent the last decade dreaming of tariffs and mapping out Keynesian infrastructure projects and planning for a détente with Moscow.

Instead, Trump campaigned surrounded by politicians, operatives and surrogates whose only real commonality was opportunism. Back when he seemed likely to lose the election handily, this was a reason to wonder about his movement’s staying power — would Newt Gingrich, Ben Carson and Sean Hannity really remain European-style populist nationalists once their patron was defeated?