I suppose I need to remind myself that I am operating on a faulty conception of the concentration of power in an age of oligarchy.
Needless to say, power...especially economic and political power is far more concentrated than it was, say, 50 years ago. However there is no absolute locus of power.
This is what makes a global empire (and its relationship to a civilization) so difficult to understand.
Power may reside in a certain class. That is, if you have a certain personality and you do certain things - that is if you have a type A personality and you are interested in business and money, or politics, and given that you are from the right background and have the right skin color, gender, sexuality, and starting material base, you are more likely to wield power.
However power is constantly in flux. There are multiple factions competing for power within the US empire. And there are multiple centers of power throughout the globe competing for the position of hegemonic empire, all of which have their own inner competing factions.
An oligarchy wields great power, but they all have to share it. There are plenty of industries constantly fighting to eat each others' lunch.
The deep state, that is, those murky coordinates in which the national security state and the defense industry meet is also a creature of its own, and it is difficult to determine how involved the President is in its decisions.
The President is more a people-pleasing type, and so in the spirit of bipartisanship he kept on many neocons from the Bush administration, who have essentially handed this ongoing disaster in the Ukraine to his administration on a plate.
And so on.
If power were truly concentrating to absolute levels in a single point, the US empire would be much more responsive than it is now, though probably more brittle, if it isn't already brittle enough. If it seems like nothing gets done in this country anymore, it is because power has become so diffuse, but it still does remain concentrated in a minority group of factions.
Again, difficult to understand. Much easier to imagine a simplified model of power, but then that would fail to get at the true nature of things.
