There are many mysteries in the universe.

The statues on Easter Island. The ancient Antikythera mechanism. The Unicorn Frappuccino. The substance Gregg Zaun’s tailor apparently smokes before dressing his client for a Jays telecast. But the biggest mystery of all is how anyone with a working brain can still grab pom-poms and cheer for Donald Trump.

On Tuesday evening, as the free world gagged on a fresh batch of scandal cookies now baked daily inside the White House, and the words “obstruction of justice” and “impeachment” shot into the Washington air like firecrackers, Jeffrey Lord reprised his role as the president’s chief toady on CNN to inform viewers: “We are once again in high-tech lynching mode.”

There was a glint of forlorn defeat in his eyes, like a man who keeps trying to convince his adult children the Tooth Fairy is real. Lord decided to board the Make America Great Again Express a long time ago. Now that it has derailed, he’s trapped inside the twisted wreckage, hanging upside down and blaming everyone except the conductor.

And he’s not alone.

Read the latest on U.S. President Donald Trump

At the midway point of Trump’s worst week in office — and that’s saying something — his travelling band of surrogates, liars, bootlickers, enablers, brown-nosers and excuse-makers are in quite a bind.

They can cling to fantasy or accept reality. Fantasy: Trump is a victim of anything other than gross incompetence. Reality: Trump is on the verge of an epic implosion and they are destined to become collateral damage.

Instead of defending the indefensible, Lord might give some thought to escaping. Maybe he can beg Melissa McCarthy to lend him the motorized lectern she recently rode on Saturday Night Live as Sean Spicer. Maybe he can hide out in bushes until winter.

What Lord can’t do is expect things to get better.

They are only going to get worse.

What more can Trump do to make this clear? Twist off the heads of live kittens on national television? Invade Canada? Strip down and streak across Pennsylvania Avenue with the nuclear codes tattooed on his buttocks?

This week we learned Trump handles highly sensitive classified information the way a grade schooler treats a cooties secret. We learned he asked the FBI to stop investigating his inner circle, as if the FBI were a drywall contractor gouging the Trump Corporation in Manila.

We learned what we already knew: Trump is so unfit for public office, so incapable of not shooting himself in the foot while wearing his socks on his ears, the world would be better off if the Oval Office were occupied by a Talking Elmo glued atop a Roomba. There’d be much less danger and the floors would be clean.

It’s one thing for Fox News, a longtime outpost for Republican talking points, to ignore, deflect or downplay the latest bombshells. Fox is the equivalent of North Korean state media. Any network that employs Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity — the axis of doofus — is not a network that is serious about reality.

And it’s one thing for the cherry-picking, anti-liberal rabble-rousers at Breitbart to reframe this week as a “deep state” revenge plot. Breitbart is Steve Bannon’s ventriloquist dummy, mouthing his fever dreams and riling up commenters who inhabit a parallel universe in which all life is sustained by paranoid rage.

But that still leaves a startling number of presumably decent people like Lord who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by continuing to shelter Trump from a crap storm of the president’s making.

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To quote John McCain, this is reaching “Watergate size and scale.”

Read more:

Trump’s White House faces ‘downward spiral’ as tempers flare, confusion swirls

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Trump’s revelations to Russia ‘wholly appropriate,’ adviser says

Even Jimmy Fallon and Dave Chappelle regret taking it easy on Trump.

This might explain why the cable networks are now finding it tougher to book Republicans who will defend Trump than atheists who rely on scripture. Trump’s hurricane of chaos threatens to blow away both his agenda and the increasingly tenuous one that keeps Paul Ryan from jumping off the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

Build a wall along the southern border? It’s not clear if Trump has enough support to build a deck on the South Lawn. Tax reform? Not anytime soon. How is Trump going to create millions of new jobs when his own job is at risk after four months?

If this presidency were a piece of furniture, it would be an exploding ottoman.

And what will become of Team Trump? It’s doubtful Kellyanne Conway, who allegedly told MSNBC hosts she needed to “take a shower” after cheerleading for Trump, could get polling work with KFC. And based on his new skill set, Spicer’s best prospects may be at Walmart as a greeter, where he’d robotically point toward major appliances whenever someone asked for directions to the toy department.

This week, Trump proved the Never Trumpers were always right. So the Trumpers Forever now have a choice: escape the mangled wreckage or perish inside.