Does Donald Trump sound presidential? Quantitatively, he doesn’t.

I compared his speech to that of several recent presidents using natural language processing techniques. Everything is hyperbolic: it’s either great, the best or the worst, terrible or stupid.

Contrary to the conservative meme, Barack Obama doesn’t talk about himself more than other presidents. Trump, however, does, barely edging out George H.W. Bush.

This piece was a companion to 95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue. This was a very fun piece of deadline computational linguistics for journalism. Much to my excitement, this got written up on Language Log.