The Victors

For the last two years, since November of 2024, I've been working on a book with the title The Triumph of Stupidity.

Here's the basic statement of purpose from the intro:

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A central thesis of the book is a multi-faceted elaboration of Fran Lebowitz’s 2018 dictum, formed after 40 years of observing her fellow New York City resident: “You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.” This, the available evidence more than adequately demonstrates, is hardly hyperbole, and it is a key to understanding a national disaster of almost indescribable proportions.

Yet this book also lays out the very considerable extent to which Trump and Trumpism are symptoms rather than causes of that disaster, although of course they are both. Indeed, The Triumph of Stupidity is in the end primarily about the cultural conditions that made Trump and his movement possible. In this sense we might say that, given the state of America in the early decades of the 21st century, if Donald Trump had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. Trump, as we shall see, is not president despite his stupidity, but rather very much because of it. In short, the underlying cause of Trumpism is -- to use a term playing off Cory Doctorow’s all too useful concept of “enshittification” --the general enstupidization of American life, that Trump himself has both exploited and exacerbated.

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I'm continuing to revise and update the manuscript, and plan to do so through the midterms eight weeks from today, before trying to sell this version of it. The book also now includes a 6,300-word appendix, featuring 115 specific instances of Trumpian stupidity, with links, for the TL;DR generation.

Anyway, my question is this. I'm trying to come up with a subtitle, and am considering

THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY: AMERICA IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY: AMERICA AFTER A DECADE OF TRUMPISM

I'm wondering if anybody has an opinion on which one of those would work better.