What happened in 2018 ? What do you remember ? Analyzing over 2,000 press reports each month can help answer that question. But even with the assistance of advanced computer programs, how do you summarize a whole year ? How do you choose a succinct and meaningful title for this work ? Donald Trump provided us with a clear and concice answer by declaring publicly that he was a « very stable genius ». Indeed, 2018 was the year of the « very stable genius » and it’s presented and analyzed here month by month, using both our computer method and our human analysis of the same set of data from a representative sampling system of international media. And Yes, the key word was « Trump ».

Karl M. van Meter is an American-French citizen with four university degrees from the US, the UK and France. As a mathematician and research sociologist, he has published widely in French and in English. He is the founding editor of the bilingual quarterly scientific journal, the Bulletin of Sociological Methodology / Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, or BMS, once published by L’Harmattan.