There’s something cosmically perverse about the fact that a president whose reading habits, by all accounts, are practically nonexistent has inspired a deluge of books about his tenure in the White House.

A number of them are elaborate chronicles of bad behavior, full of double-dealing and palace intrigue. The sources tend to be current or former White House staffers jostling for position and posterity, strategically leaking to journalists in order to cast themselves as noble custodians and their rivals as craven sycophants. Whatever you might learn from the relentless churn of the news cycle, books like these suggest there’s always more.

“Unmaking the Presidency,” by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes, isn’t just another compendium of insider gossip and bumbling treachery. The authors offer something more sobering, more analytical and, at this point, more revealing. “Unmaking the Presidency” situates Trump’s tenure in the history of the executive branch, and shows how he is remaking the office itself in his own image.

Hennessey and Wittes, who edit the blog Lawfare, argue that Trump is pursuing a “vision of the presidency” that’s all his own. Not that this “vision” requires much expenditure of effort on the president’s part; Trump, just by being Trump, “elevates the expressive and personal dimensions of the office.” This is the authors’ careful way of saying what they eventually conclude: that Trump wants the executive to look more like an absolutist monarchy, with all of the glory and unfettered power that entails.