This repressive control of State extends into real policy as well. Trump rejected Tillerson’s choice for his Deputy Secretary, Elliot Abrams, an unheard-of step prompted by Abrams “insufficient loyalty” to Trump.

This is a tendency Trump has made a habit. He also didn’t allow his new national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, to bring in his own deputy. This ensures that the principal is isolated and dependent on day-to-day operators primarily loyal to the president and therefore a potential backdoor on their bosses. It’s a classic despot move.

It also ensures that the only candidates who will take the jobs are those without strong relationships in their policy area or who don’t really care about the operations of their department so long as they get a title and some power. Lightweights, dilettantes and opportunists — Trump’s egomaniacal management style concentrates power into these sorts of hands.

All this seems to be in overdrive at the State Department where those 54 unfilled leadership positions leave the political amateur Tillerson isolated with only Trump-approved assistants around him. Let’s hope there’s no major international incidents he might need to navigate any time soon.

This is where the administration’s incompetence begins to show. For all the deep analysis and examination of this regime, it bears remembering that some of their decisions and policies are simply a function of them not knowing what the fuck they are doing. They worship U.S. power but have no idea how it works.

Look, for example, at Trump’s most consequential foreign policy decision to date: the cancellation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump killed it as part of his fascist-callback “America First” philosophy, but the TPP was a crucial expression of U.S. imperialist power.

Trade agreements are most certainly not about “free” trade. Their most consistent and important effect is to flood developing countries with subsidized U.S. agricultural products, killing native agriculture and forcing its peasantry into extractive industries and urban factories where U.S. based corporations extract tremendous value from their labor.

All the high tech equipment needed to make all that work are also U.S. exports (or exports from other imperial allies), blocking any industrial development that might move these countries beyond dependence on raw material production. International law then protects these machines and programs with extraordinary “intellectual property” exported from the dominant economies.

Exiled Philippine revolutionary Jose Maria Sison put it best before the legendary 1999 WTO protests in Seattle when he said, “a handful of imperialist states — headed by the U.S. and concentrated in the Group of Seven — control and use an array of the most powerful multilateral agencies, like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, to determine the pattern of investments and trade in the client states and thereby dominate the world, economically and consequently in all other respects.”

But Trump doesn’t understand this. His gets his understanding of trade policies and U.S. intervention in the world from cable T.V. He followed this ignorance and cancelled the TPP because he thinks that this will help put “America First.” It won’t.

If he does somehow understand this, then he risked America’s imperial power for the sake of domestic political popularity. That too would be incompetence with a sheen of demagoguery rising to the top.

Yet for all the incompetence involved, there is also something very conscious going on. Steve Bannon, clearly at this point the regime’s most important visionary, said at the Conservative Political Action Committee last week that his aim is “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” He is set to destroy the liberal order in a way no previous regime has ever had the guts to.

The liberal state is always measuring, monitoring and memorandizing various aspects of life. The more data points it identifies, surveillance it operates and paperwork it generates, the bigger the bureaucracy grows. Bannon wants to destroy it all, root and branch.

Liberalism extended to the international realm created international bureaucracies and Bannon — not to mention Trump — opposes these institutions and the agreements emanating from them. This includes the TPP and NAFTA as well as the E.U., NATO and the U.N.

The State Department played a key role in the development of these institutions, and over the last 60 to 70 years it has spent a great deal of its time and energy maintaining and extending them. To this end, it has developed a sprawling bureaucracy. There is no way for Bannon to carry out his vision without destroying State.

For any conventional right-wing regime, Foggy Bottom would be high-hanging fruit. But Trump and company went straight for it, and if they can shatter the crown jewel of liberal internationalism they can take out anything else.

But there are contradictions at work here. How are they resolved?