Dalrymple was not surprised by the North Korean regime’s use of the word dotard in referring to President Trump, because of this experience during his 1989 visit to the country:

I was emerging from the Great People’s Study House in Pyongyang, which, architecturally speaking, is a hybrid of pagoda and Fascist mausoleum. Stretched out before it was one of those vast empty spaces in which the regime holds its interminable Busby Berkeley cum Nuremberg rallies. As the Marquis de Custine said of the vast open spaces of St. Petersburg, in his great book Russia in 1839, a crowd (meaning a crowd that gathered there spontaneously, rather than under government direction) would be a revolution.

A single North Korean passed me in the square. “Do you speak English?” he asked…