“Get over it”: that is how Mick Mulvaney, acting chief of staff at the White House, dismissed evidence that his boss bribed a foreign government to publicise bogus charges against his chief political rival. But it’s about as easy to get over Trump as it is to shrug off a cancer diagnosis. With Hillary Clinton archly hinting at her readiness for a rerun of the 2016 election, others are reinterpreting the past either to delegitimise Trump after the event or to prepare for his vindication at the polls next November.

A weary, regretful deja vu pervades Crime in Progress, written by the researchers who brought to light the notorious dossier that traced Trump’s grubby dealings with Russian gangsters; the same document described a cabaret act supposedly staged for him by some micturating Moscow hookers, commended by Putin as “the best in the world”. Simpson and Fritsch hoped the FBI would use the information they provided to indict Trump, though its then director James Comey instead reprimanded Clinton for her insecure email server. They were disappointed a second time by the noncommittal Mueller report. This “secret history” of their persecution by angry Republicans who disputed their findings attempts to relitigate the case.

Simpson and Fritsch aspire to be latter-day versions of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who exposed Nixon’s Watergate cover-up: their book opens with Fritsch sneakily foiling Bernstein’s appeal for information, and later Simpson derides Woodward for cosying up to Trump. But the new guys lack the crusading bravado of their predecessors. Their opposition to Trump starts out as a “business opportunity”, not a quest for truth or a challenge to power, and they go to work like conscientious geeks, assisted by a man they call “a human hard drive” and a woman who serves as their “in-house cyber-ninja”.

The retold tale is revved up by hyperactive verbs – Simpson “cracks open” his MacBook, “pops” a beer can, and “shoots” a text message to Fritsch – and includes a strained homage to the episodes in All the President’s Men when Woodward ventures into an underground car park for creepy confabs with the CIA informant he nicknamed “Deep Throat”: summoned to testify at the US Capitol, Simpson and Fritsch are ushered into “a dimly lit chamber” in the basement where poor lighting gives their Republican inquisitor “a lizard-like appearance”, then sequestered in another office that feels “like a weird terrarium out of a sci-fi movie”. Yet there is no “cathartic finale” to match Nixon’s fall, and the ominous title of Crime in Progress deflates when the authors admit that Trump’s “conspiring with Russia may not be a crime provable in federal court”.

Last year an unidentified White House official wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the efforts of aides to frustrate the president’s most “batshit” proposals. Trump denounced the article as an act of treason, but because his only means of self-defence is name-calling, he had trouble mocking his nameless detractor. At a rally in Montana “Anonymous” got entangled with “Anomalous” on his flapping tongue and, after some slurs and gobbles that suggested dodgy dentures, the compound word expired in a sibilant whistle. In A Warning the op-ed’s covert author accuses the president of mental instability; I suppose his inarticulacy is the least of our worries.

Like Simpson and Fritsch, Anonymous reels through Trump’s outrages all over again, adding a few new charges, among them a scheme to sabotage the rule of law by abolishing federal judges. Though A Warning traffics in scandal, its tone is classically lofty, with tributes to noble Romans such as Cicero and pious epigraphs from America’s founding fathers. Anonymity is presented as a selfless patriotic virtue: the writer challenges Trump on principle, not as a disgruntled individual – but now that others are openly testifying to Congress, this impersonality could just as well be deemed a form of moral cowardice.

A Warning ends by saluting the passengers who stormed the cockpit of a hijacked plane on 9/11, knowing they would die but hoping to prevent the terrorists from reaching their target in Washington. Anonymous, however, is no martyr: he or she hopes to survive. How different is this duplicity from the craven writhings of Mulvaney, who once called the president he now serves “a terrible human being”?

On his first day in office, after a squabble about crowd size at his inauguration, Trump demanded a phenomenological adjustment. “Truth and reality”, as Simpson and Fritsch put it, were replaced by Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”, AKA falsehoods. “The Trump story,” adds Anonymous, “is briskly moving into a fictional universe.”

Doug Wead’s Inside Trump’s White House goes further, advancing to enraptured fantasy. Wead, a veteran Republican toady, acclaims Trump for “the magic of thinking big”; his own padded, puffy volume is an exercise in magical thinking.

Like a sun king freshly solarised on the tanning bed, Wead’s Trump radiates “beauty and intellect”. His sons are “well groomed”, his daughters “statuesque”, and his consort bends down from her spike-heeled altitude to “reach out to the suffering”. While Melania is cast as a stilettoed Madonna, Trump functions as a universal paterfamilias. “It’s a father thing,” smarms Jared Kushner to explain Kim Jong-un’s attachment to Trump: Kim’s actual begetter was a maniacal despot, so the chubby ogre has chosen a fitting surrogate.

Acclaimed by Wead as the creator of his own “immortal brand”, a lucrative logo that is “etched into the marble of history”, Trump the mass-market Midas dispenses product placements at every turn. Wead, briefly alarmed, sees him press “a big, fat red button” on a table; the command produces one of the dozen Diet Cokes he swills each day, not a missile strike. Having secured the release of an American pastor imprisoned in Turkey, Trump welcomes the former hostage home by offering him a fistful of Tic Tac mints. The pastor kneels to pray and proclaims “a wonderful story of redemption”: lo and behold, the saviour who delivered him from bondage has also cured his halitosis!

Wead is equally devout. He marvels at Trump’s “mystical rise to the presidency”, and cites “a privately conducted name-recognition poll” that identifies him as “the second most famous person on Earth, after Jesus”. Since Jesus is not currently on Earth, Trump probably elbows his way to first place – and if, by hook or devilish crook, he does get his venal arse re-elected, we might as well start the countdown to the second coming.

• Crime in Progress by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

• A Warning by Anonymous is published by Little, Brown (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

• Inside Trump’s White House by Doug Wead is published by Biteback (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15