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.