They're doing so many things which could normally be described as "Cartoonishly Self Destructive" that it's hard to keep up with their actual objectives.
What's even less clear to me is why the apparatus of state seems so willing to go along with these whims of the executive.
I'd imagine every EU/UK company is re-thinking any US based conferences they have booked right now, because who knows if your field will suddenly fall under their whims.
More important question is 'What's going on with the US people?'
Are they "just following orders"?
Mexico just changed from a superdemagogic leader to one less so. Their deceptively simple recipe is, like Alice in Wonderland, doing five unimportant stupid things before breakfast, so their next important stupid thing doesn't look as bad.
Can you expand on this a bit more? Are you suggesting that government employees should quit in protest? For better or for worse, the American President is in charge of the executive branch and (most? all?) US government employees are part of that branch.
It's also important to remember that democracies are weird in the sense that people who could abuse power voluntarily do not do so. Democratic systems only work because people accept that they work (similar to fiat money). Once people start questioning them, they can fail very quickly (see the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank).
Presidential systems are particularly susceptible to this sudden collapse because they start out with a strong concentration of power in one person.
After all the recent firings and appointments, so many people in positions of power believe in unconstrained executive action that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recent Supreme Court decisions related to presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office bolster this view.
Americans feel (somewhat rightly) that their democracy isn't responsive enough, and even if it was more responsive, they feel it doesn't represent them. Many of them seem to think the only way to fix this is to have a king.
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To connect this back to HackerNews relevant discussion, I feel there's a bit of an "innovators dilemma" at play with democracies. The democracies which developed the earliest have some design flaws baked very deeply into their mechanics that later democracies recognized as problems and were able to avoid. But in older democracies, there's too many entrenched interests against fixing these problems so they keep ancient design flaws even when everyone knows they're counterproductive (and in the present case, perhaps even fatal)
The other thing that’s sad to see is that slides into substandard leadership have plenty of precedent - strong, well-run countries have many times reverted thanks to incoming leaders being worse at the job. The US has just come off an exceptional run of competent and strong leaders driven by ideals, but eventually your hot streak is going to come to an end. To put it another way, this looks to be a reversion to the mean.
That's the only way so far I've managed to make sense of what the USA is doing to itself, the destruction is the point.
"There is a class of men whose sole delight is in destroying" William Blake