Time and again during the Congressional hearings on the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the legislators and witnesses struggled to understand how Donald Trump could just flat-out deny he had lost the 2020 election. Didn’t matter what any aides or lawyers said – as far as he was concerned, he had won. And that justified any action taken to enforce his view.

I have found the most useful insights for understanding Donald Trump to be a decades-old book: Inside the Criminal Mind, by Dr Stanton Samenow.  Samenow’s analytic framework can be applied to all sorts of people you meet in daily life, including, I believe, successful and widely admired business executives, politicians and high-ranking officials.

Essentially, Samenow says, criminals are fundamentally different from most of us. They see other humans as mere objects who are either potentially useful tools or obstacles. They don’t really care about anyone other than themselves and their gratification. As far as the criminal is concerned, they’re in colour while the rest of us are in black and white.

Stanton is a psychologist, not a medical doctor, but forensic psychiatrists I have spoken to, along with law enforcement people who have had to deal with criminals have recommended the book to me. The first time I heard about it was while being given a tour of the California State Hospital in Atascadero back in 2002.

Atascadero State is formally described as a maximum-security ‘forensic psychiatric facility’. In past times it would have been called an asylum for criminally insane men. It has been a controversial place, often subject to civil rights investigations, inmate lawsuits, murders of one inmate by another, massive staff turnover and challenges to the constitutionality of detaining convicted criminals there for long periods after their initial sentences were served.