20 January—On the ninth and first anniversaries of the Trump inaugurations, an observant reader writing from California reminds us that although Melania held the Lincoln and Trump bibles next to her husband for the 2021 swearing-in ceremony Trump didn’t in fact place his hand on either—or on her—for the presidential oath. He had done it in 2017. But he hadn’t had to.

For the record, John Quincy Adams in 1825 used a law book, supposedly to symbolize his oath to the Constitution; Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, after President McKinley’s assassination, didn’t use a Bible or any book; Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1963, took the presidential oath on JFK’s Catholic missal that was found on Air Force One after JFK’s death; and in 1923, Calvin Coolidge claimed that swearing oaths on a bible wasn’t the practice in Vermont (where he was born) or Massachusetts (where he was governor and died).

On the subject of Donald Trump, confidential word from the White House is that, as is the demented (not just unstable) rogue president’s wont, he has come up with two “great, brilliant, and beautiful” designs for a new presidential seal that he considers—and really are—better representations of him than an eagle and some Latin words. But he can’t decide which to use . . .