Eight days before Donald J. Trump took his presidential oath before a crowd whose size he still insists on fibbing about, I wrote a column titled "Life under Trump — what happens now?"
"In a dictatorship, particularly where the despot is a megalomaniac in the vein of a Saddam Hussein or a Moammar Gadhafi, citizens obsess over the Great Leader's every move. These days, there's no better place to witness this phenomenon than the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan," I wrote on Jan. 12, 2017.
I described how the founding dictator of that post-Soviet authoritarian state was manic, "constantly passing edicts and decrees about anything and everything that crossed his mind." "Whenever I visited Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi," I wrote back then, "the only thing anyone ever talked about — and this included ex-pats — was Turkmenbashi."