In the US, people consider any public sector job to be working in/for the government. Judges, Legislators, the president, TSA security, Park Rangers, Cops, Clerks at the driver’s license office, etc. would all be considered government roles. Sometimes you need to clarify if you mean federal government or state government.

The president, his staff, and his political appointees are called the administration.

Yeah we have three branches of government.

Executive Judicial Legislative

The President heads the executive branch. The Legislative branch is split into the Senate (2 representatives from every state) and Congress (number of representatives depicted by state population size). (The Vice President actually sits in the Senate and can be used as a tie-breaker (101 votes instead of of 100 senators). The Leader of the House (Congress) is third in line for the presidency. The judicial branch is mostly known to be the Supreme Court but also contains the Federal Judicial Center.

Basically. For a law to exist you have to get a Majority vote from Congress and the Senate. Then the president signs it into law, or can Veto it. (If Congress has 2/3 vote the president veto would be overwrote). Same is required to amend the constitution itself (2/3)

Also if the people don’t feel representatives have gotten their issue to the floor there are petitions. If a petition gets a lot of signatures it requires a formal response by the legislature. During the Obama administration he opened a website called We The People that allowed signatures for petitions and if 100,000 signatures were garnered it was required to get a formal response. This website was shut down during the first Trump administration in 2018.

So the Judicial branches job is to review any bill being signed into law and ensure it is not in conflict with previous laws, or deemed “unconstitutional” which would block the law and send it back to the legislature requiring them to acquire a 2/3 vote to amend the constitution where it conflicts.

The legislative branch also holds the power to oust the President if they overstep. Essentially if over 50% of Congress believes the president should be removed they can impeach him. Which sends it to the Senate. (Most every president has removed themselves upon a majority of Congress but they aren’t required to yet). When it goes to the Senate they hold a trial. A 2/3 vote of the Senate implements the presidents removal. (The Republicans in the Senate did not vote to remove Trump, and thus they never had 2/3s of the vote and he refused to step down.). John Tyler and Richard Nixon both resigned before the Senate voted.

In verse 40, “brothers and sisters of mine”, they think it means white, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, neurotypical, conservative people.

Currently the consequence is they aren’t accepting the termination of their enjoyment and aren’t leaving.

If the consequence of not following the rules means it doesn’t get enforced then he cares very much.

I suppose if the firings are regarded as “official acts,” the courts will support POTUS on this one.

What exactly stops him from having these people forcibly removed and/or their access to government resources cut, their paychecks held, their clearances revoked, etc? Who is in charge of those things that can stand up to that?

Trump doesn’t directly do any of those things, he would have to order other people to do so, and the risk of doing so is that if he encounters more resistance people start to notice that the emperor has no clothes.

The more people resist the more it encourages others to do the same. The president is not a king that can dictate commands, and the more people stop obeying the more Trump runs into those protections that stop him being a tyrant.

My concern as well. Trump really doesn’t seem to give a damn this go-around. There were people in place that hit the brakes on him last time, but this time nobody’s doing shit.

What exactly stops him from having these people forcibly removed and/or their access to government resources cut, their paychecks held, their clearances revoked, etc? Who is in charge of those things that can stand up to that?

What stops him is people willing to ignore obviously illegal demands, and the more people that stand up to him the more people will be encouraged to do the same. Now, if Trump openly defies court orders and the executive branch has enough sycophants in it that they’re willing to help him, then it becomes up to us to solve that problem.

Join a LGBT+ friendly group, don’t be a a fuckin fairy about it.

Is “limp-wrist coward” a slur? Seems more like an insult of someone’s habits.

It’ll be like Roe. Where they lose at every level because it’s obvious until they get to SCOTUS. Who will decide in the GOP’s favor based on the Papal Bull of 462.

The first day of his inaguration, Trump put forth an executive order that will attempt to make all federal employees Schedule F, basically, the same protections as a political appointee instead of a civil servant. This will make them basically at will employees.

DunkinCoder is correct they are also making it really awful to work for the federal government with RTO and freezing of funding. And the hiring freeze. But it’s not the complete picture, its actually much worse.

There will be court cases with federal employees trying to keep their jobs. I suspect they will fail, due to how the courts are republican controlled right now. The firings haven’t started yet. Expect them soon. There will be loyalty tests. There’s an email floating around asking federal employees to rat on “DEI hires”, whatever that is. Are minorities that are actually entirely qualified for their federal position a “DEI hire”? Do you get fired if you don’t pretend that they are?

Edit - article: link

Who’s going to stop them?

Not really. The goal aside from probationary employees is to make the workforce miserable so they quit and starve itself in the process. RTOs (especially for those hired remotely, say states away), is one example.

“Hey the government is even more inefficient, let’s fire all the low performers.” - To the employee left doing 5x usual workload at 50% efficiency.

Can the US government just fire anybody they want for whatever reason?

Only when a Republican is in office. When a Democrat is in office, we have to keep DeJoy running the post office.

One BIG thing to consider is that in other countries citizens weren’t nearly as well armed as the U.S.

Yes. And if we go down that path, not only will millions perish in the purges, but then China will take us economically, and may be the Allies to our Axis.

And much like Germany, the brain drain and infighting at the top ranks will slow them down and become an exploitable weakness.

If we’re not careful, we’ll organize a rebellion and overthrow the Trump regime only to have it replaced with another despot, and then (as the pattern goes) another and another and another until everyone knows someone who’s perished in the fighting. And that’s no guarantee of a democracy.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve advocated we do something that (AFAIK) we’ve never tried before, and create a constitution before we try to overthrow the government. Make it public; get legal experts to pick at it for loopholes and exploits to close until it’s ironclad. And then, unlike the constitutional framers of the US, don’t let the fighting leaders take place as administrative officials.

But I’m a novice at history and sociopolitical studies. Maybe we are doomed to a century of tyranny and all we have wrought will burn in fire. But I know instances have occurred in which something different happened, via non-violent resistance, even.

At this point get involved with your mutual aid orgs and community orgs. The more of us that organize to resist, the more likely it will actually succeed.

PS: To borrow some phrasing from Donald Rumsfeld, You build a society with the people you have, not the people you wish you had or might have at a later time. But we do still have access to the internet, and not just Facebook and Twitter, even if a lot of people barely move beyond social media. We have the resources to train people to think critically, to develop class consciousness and civic and political literacy.