They say there are only three certainties in life: death, taxes and books about former US president Donald Trump releasing with extracts that make your eyebrows jump off your face.

Well, the latter might be a recent addition, but it’s been proven once again with several extracts from Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrat’s Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump, written by The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere hitting the headlines today.

Significantly, it’s not just details about the former president that have got Washington DC and US politics watchers chattering.

Here’s the roundup of the juiciest bits that have been revealed so far.

Barack Obama called Trump a ‘madman’ and more

The normally calm and collected 44th president was reportedly anything but when it came to talking about his successor in private.

The Guardian reports that Obama called Trump a:

• “madman”
• “racist, sexist pig”
• “f***ing lunatic”
• “corrupt mother******” after learning that Trump was speaking to foreign leaders without any US aides on the call

It’s no secret that Obama holds zero love for the 45th president, after Trump shot to political prominence boosting the racist birther conspiracy theories while Obama was in office.

But this is the first time the extent of the animosity has been publicly reported.

Obama invited Trump to the White House after the 2016 election, an invitation Trump never extended to Biden. Photo: Reuters

The various descriptors for Trump happened when Obama was speaking with “big donors looking to squeeze a reaction out of him in exchange for the big cheques they were writing to his foundation” according to the book, which the Guardian has seen an advance copy of.

Dovere also writes in the book that Obama initially preferred Donald Trump over Republican senator Ted Cruz as the Republican nominee because Trump was not as smart as Cruz. “I didn’t think it would be this bad” Obama reportedly told donors.

First lady Jill Biden told Vice-President Kamala Harris to ‘go f*** yourself”

One of the most memorable moments from the early stages of the crowded 2020 Democratic primary was then-senator Kamala Harris’s savage verbal crash-tackle of the former vice-president during the first debate.

Go on, relive the moment:

The scripted and targeted attack (just hours after the debate you could buy merch referencing the slap down) went viral and gave Harris’ already struggling campaign a massive bump in the polls.

In an extract from the book published by Politico, Dovere writes that while Biden played the attack off as the rough-and-tumble of campaign politics in public, his wife Jill did not in private.

“‘With what he cares about, what he fights for, what he’s committed to, you get up there and call him a racist without basis?’ she said on a phone call with close supporters a week later, according to multiple people on the call. ‘Go f*** yourself.'” Dovere writes.

The book makes it clear that then-former second lady was so hurt by the attack because of Harris’s close friendship with her late son Beau Biden. Throwing that friendship out the window, one that was later proffered by their campaigns as the reason Harris and Biden would work so well together, to score a political point was too far for the new first lady.

The Bidens and Harris have publically buried the hatchet after clashing on the campaign trail. Photo: Reuters

Biden felt something was off about Clinton’s 2016 campaign

In an extract from the book published in The Atlantic, Dovere writes that Biden had serious doubts about the Clinton campaign a few days before the election.

“‘The arc of history has always been forward, and what these guys’ – Republicans – “want to do is literally move it backward,’ he’d warned an audience in Madison, Wisconsin, the previous Friday. ‘It doesn’t feel right there,’ he told aides when he returned to Washington,” Dovere writes.

The book reveals Biden and Obama had private concerns about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Photo: Reuters