Following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th U.S. president on Jan. 20, 2025, a rumor spread online that Trump took the oath of office without placing his hand on a bible.
Multiple readers wrote in to ask whether the rumor was true. Examples of the claim also appeared (archived) in numerous posts (archived) on social media platforms including X (archived) and Reddit (archived).
(@MichaelSteele on X)
Photos of the swearing-in ceremony showing Trump with his right hand raised and his left hand at his side — as opposed to atop the stack of bibles first lady Melania Trump held while standing next to him — were authentic, unedited images from the Jan. 20 ceremony.
Trump also did not visibly place his left hand on the bibles at any point in the below video footage of the oath, made available by C-SPAN and The Associated Press.
Based on this evidence, it's demonstrably true that Trump took at least part of the oath without placing his hand on a bible.
However, Trump's hand and the bibles were not fully visible throughout the duration of that video clip. For example, around the 02:21 time-stamp in that video, the camera cut to an angle from which Trump's entire left side and most of the bible stack were obscured from view, as can be seen in the screenshot below.
(C-SPAN)
If and when additional footage of the oath of office showing the position of Trump's left hand for the entire oath becomes available, or if authentic photos showing that Trump did touch the bible during the event emerge, we'll update this story. Until such evidence becomes available, we're refraining from rating this claim.
Legally speaking, however, it doesn't matter whether Trump placed his hand on a bible for the oath.
Despite what some (archived) social media users have claimed (archived), placing a hand on the bible is not a requirement for any public oath of office in the United States, and failure to do it does not make the oath invalid. Rather, the practice of placing a hand on the bible while taking an oath of office is an informal convention without any legal meaning.
In fact, Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution explicitly notes that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or Public Trust under the United States."
A note on that specific clause in Constitution Annotated, a compendium of constitutional history and interpretation that the Library of Congress maintains, explained that this clause of the Constitution came about as a direct rejection of the historical English practice of requiring officeholders to swear loyalty to the Church of England.
If Trump did indeed refrain from placing his hand on the bible for the entire ceremony, he wasn't the first president to take the oath of office without touching a religious text.
For example, John Quincy Adams claimed to have used a book of law instead of a bible for his 1825 swearing-in, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. And in 1901, following the assassination of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as the 26th president without placing his hand on any text.