1. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

Mary L Trump

This dynastic history by a trained psychologist authoritatively diagnoses Trump’s sickness: Donald, as his niece Mary calls him with casual contempt, is a damaged individual, emotionally stunted and morally warped by his upbringing, who has infected the US with his own “toxic positivity”. Aware of her wicked uncle’s vindictiveness, Mary says that if he’s re-elected she intends to apply for a British passport. Let’s hope she will not be driven to such an act of reckless desperation.

2. How Trump Thinks: His Tweets and the Birth of a New Political Language

Peter Oborne and Tom Roberts

Published soon after the inauguration, this anthology of Trump’s bird-brained tweets extends backwards to the early days when, like a door-to-door salesman too shiftless to leave home, he used Twitter to tout the shoddy merchandise he and Melania were marketing on the Shopping Network. Oborne and Roberts usefully memorialise Trump at his most naively tawdry, and preserve some treasurable illiteracies. I love the moment when he berates the Chinese for committing an “unpresidented act” by confiscating a US navy drone – a precedent for his own imminent unpresidenting?

3. American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

Tim Alberta

This anatomy of moral cowardice and seamy self-interest watches the Republicans shrug off their principles as they surrender to Trump’s hostile takeover of their party and make “a deal with the devil”. The obsequious Mike Pence once told friends that he “loathed Trump”, and Lindsey Graham aptly defined him as “a race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot”; then they and their cronies got down to some slavish bootlicking. It will be fun to watch them belying their lies if and when he loses.

4. Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Michael Wolff

Grubbing up gossip, Wolff is deliciously viperish, and on his publicity tour he augmented the already scandalous record by implying, with no evidence at all, that Trump and Nikki Haley used Air Force One as their flying motel room. To his credit, Wolff is astute and a little shamefaced when analysing the complicity between Trump and the journalists whom he officially reviles. Trump wants publicity, the hacks want copy: the two sides have a smelly mutual dependency, and no one escapes unbesmirched.

5. A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump’s Testing of America

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig

A while ago, updating his claim to be a genius, Trump invited us to admire his “magnificently brilliant” answers in a television interview; I’d rather trust his former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who viewed him as “a fucking moron”. This book is the blackest of comedies, nihilistically hilarious in its documentation of Trump’s incompetence. Rucker and Leonnig also give us a glimpse of his sulphurous cynicism as he sneers at the suckers who voted for him. “I’m a total act,” he told his director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci, “and I don’t understand why people don’t get it.”

6. Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

Ben Fountain

Among all the “haters”, as Trump petulantly calls his critics, Fountain is the most lethal. His descriptions of the man are an exercise in black magic, and every metaphor is a graphic curse: head like a battering ram, eyes of a garbage-guzzling raccoon, hair sculpted by a flamethrower, verbal drivel like a slurry. But the anger is justified by an underlying grief. Fountain’s book, derived from articles commissioned by the Guardian, broods about an ideal America that Trump has defiled and debased, perhaps irreparably.

7. Full Disclosure

Stormy Daniels

A hollow machismo was always crucial to Trump’s belligerent brand, and Stormy Daniels nimbly punctures his virile posing. She giggles at Trump’s unimpressive tackle, deplores his lack of coital stamina, and grimaces at the puddle he leaves on her tummy. Worst of all is his whiny plea for a second date. Trump told the journalist Bob Woodward that he wanted to be feared, which is the hope of all would-be autocrats; the way to bring him down, as Stormy realises, is not to shudder in alarm but to shake with incredulous mirth.

8. Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents

Pete Souza

Souza, Obama’s official photographer, here compiles a hagiographic gallery of the previous president enlightening the world, quietly communing with colleagues, or just doing his job. Splenetic quotes from Trump or tabloid headlines about his antics are placed on the facing pages, so that he skulks in Obama’s shadow. Here is the ultimate insult to this obese, superannuated popinjay: the book renders him invisible, as if flushing him away into oblivion.