On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced his choices for the Bibles on which he would be sworn in today as President of the United States. He will lay his hand on a Bible his mother gave him in 1955 when he graduated from Presbyterian Sunday school, and the one President Abraham Lincoln used at his inauguration.
In his first inaugural address, on 4 March 1861, in a plea for unity, Lincoln famously appealed to “the better angels of our nature”.
The last, and only other president since Lincoln, to use the Lincoln Bible was outgoing president Barack Obama, both in 2009 and 2013. The 44th president said the choice was meant to emphasise Lincoln’s call for “national unity” during his first inaugural address.
Trump, for his part, appears to have been particularly impressed by Lincoln’s achieving what had once seemed impossible. In a Washington Post interview, reporter Bob Woodward asked Trump, then a candidate, what made Lincoln successful.
“Well, I think Lincoln succeeded for numerous reasons. He was a man who was of great intelligence, which most presidents would be. But he was also a man that did something that was a very vital thing to do at that time. Ten years before or 20 years before, what he was doing would never have even been thought possible,” he said.
In one of his debates with his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton he made another reference: “Honest Abe, Honest Abe never lied. That’s the good thing. That’s the big difference between Abraham Lincoln and you. That’s a big, big difference.”
The president-elect’s second Bible selection recalls his Presbyterian upbringing in Jamaica, Queens, in New York City. His mother gave it to him on 12 June 1955, upon his graduation from Sunday Church Primary School at First Presbyterian Church on Children’s Day.
“The Bible is a revised standard version published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in New York in 1953 and is embossed with his name on the lower portion of the front cover,” Tom Barrack, the inauguration chairman, said.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will administer the oath to Trump, who did not say before the ceremony whether either of the Bibles will be open to a particular passage, as is often done during the swearing in ceremony.
Vice-President elect Mike Pence will be sworn in by Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the first African American to administer the oath of office to a vice president or president.
Pence has announced that he will used the Reagan family Bible — used by President Ronald Reagan during his gubernatorial and presidential inaugurations. It will be the first time the Reagan Bible has been used to take the oath since then.
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