the.com/train wreck

means A situation or person so catastrophically chaotic that observers can't look away, even as everything falls apart.

from Literal before it was figurative: 19th-century America, when railroads were new and crashes were spectacular public disasters, newspapers reported actual train wrecks — twisted metal, scattered cars — and crowds would gather to gawk at the wreckage. By the later 1800s and into the 1900s, the phrase jumped the tracks into metaphor, applied to anyone or anything so visibly disastrous it drew the same morbid stare.