That scratching sound you can hear are the rats snatching their bags – and what’s left of their reputation – before scampering off their pirate president’s ship. It’s only slightly surprising the panic has set in before they even reached the halfway point on their voyage towards his promised treasure.

Perhaps it was the sight of the captain’s personal lawyer admitting to several five-year felonies that got them worried. Or perhaps it was the thought of a Democratic House firing subpoenas at them from the Cannon office building.

Either way, the sad excuses on public display this week are more self-incriminating than self-glorifying.

Let’s start with the bombshell anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, where a senior administration official claims to be part of a secret cabal trying to protect the nation – if not the world – from the worst impulses of the sociopathic man-child purporting to be the commander-in-chief.

Tell us something we don’t know. Actually, first tell us how long you’ve been experiencing these messiah delusions.

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“We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous,” Mr or Ms Anonymous wrote. “But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”

No doubt there were functionaries around Mussolini who believed the Italian trains had never been so punctual. But Il Duce was also – how best to put it? – detrimental to the health of the republic.

If you really believe your boss is a threat to the constitution which you’ve taken an oath to protect, perhaps you should consider quitting or going public. As in: going on Capitol Hill to hold a press conference to urge impeachment.

In this regard, and only in this regard, our anonymous whistleblower has handed the crazy boss a degree of righteous indignation.

“If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist,” tweeted the madman in the attic, “the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”

Donald, we feel your pain, albeit briefly. Your internal enemies are indeed gutless, and if you feel better putting that in ALL CAPS, that’s fine. Let it out.

But that bit about turning people over to you for national security reasons is kind of the point here. If you’ll allow us to summarize the GUTLESS person’s arguments: you are fundamentally a threat to democracy and national security yourself. You are indeed, as your lawyers have pointed out repeatedly, your own worst witness.

This much we know from this week’s other bombshell in the shape of Bob Woodward’s latest book. Woodward has cornered the panicked Trump rats into screeching about all the ways they prevented World War Three, or a massive trade war, by ignoring the ranting boss or snatching papers off his desk.

Frankly this telenovela is too far-fetched for primetime. Surely our very stable genius is faintly aware that his own officials have not yet declared war on our allies or assassinated the Syrian dictator. Then again, he does watch Fox News all day – or sometimes the Masters – so perhaps he isn’t up to speed on current affairs.

All of this might be funny if it weren’t so serious. Gary Cohn, the president’s first chief economic adviser, was one of those paper-stealers trying to save the republic. Right up to the point where his boss said all those nice things about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and Cohn threatened to quit. He was reportedly shaken that his own daughter found a swastika on the door of her college dorm room.

You know what’s as scary as a swastika on your daughter’s door? Being forcibly separated from your infant children as you legally seek asylum. This happened thousands of times, Mr Cohn, creating hundreds of orphans because your co-workers can’t even trace the deported parents. You know how that happens? Because your neo-Nazi sympathizing boss has hired actual white supremacists to work on immigration policy.

There is a consistency to the awfulness of this week’s gut-spilling revelations from the the Trump White House.

First, Donald Trump is a crazy loon who is endangering the entire world. Don’t take my word for it. This is according to the Republican political appointees who know him best and work with him every day: in other words, not “the deep state” or any other of Sean Hannity’s imaginary freaks.

Mr or Ms GUTLESS describes Trump’s decisions as “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless”, while chief of staff John Kelly says Trump is “an idiot” living in a place called “Crazytown”. This revelation led to the priceless statement from Kelly where he had to deny calling the president an idiot.

Somewhere in Texas, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson is swirling a glass of bourbon muttering that he lost his job for calling Trump a moron.

Second, Trump’s staffers are enabling the very horrors they claim to hate, while grandiosely pretending to be doing the opposite.

Mr or Ms GUTLESS says there were “early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th amendment” in what he imagines is a clear sign they can distinguish reality from reality TV.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Trump cabinet: please know that you will not be accepted into the next edition of Profiles in Courage for your early whispers. If you truly believe the president is incapacitated, you should perhaps consider raising your voice to at least conversational level, if you’re not inclined to bellow from the mountaintops. Library rules are inoperative at this point.

Given the weight of evidence, even the most diehard Trump defenders are now conceding the obvious, by signing up to the GUTLESS gang’s self-promotion. Brit Hume, a Fox News veteran, let the cat out of the bag when he tweeted that it was a “good thing” they were restraining Trump “from his most reckless impulses”.

This is how the pirate ship Trump eventually sinks to the ocean’s floor. You can fool some of Fox News’s viewers all of the time, and you can fool all of them some of the time.

But no fool wants to drown with the captain we all know is plain crazy.