A letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787 is going up for sale, and it reads less like a historical artifact and more like a memo someone should have slid under the Oval Office door about four years ago. Written from Paris, where Jefferson was serving as America's minister to France, the document warns against war, debt, and constitutional erosion with the kind of specificity that should make anyone currently running the United States deeply uncomfortable. Trump, who has called Jefferson one of his political heroes and literally installed a bronze statue of him in the Rose Garden, has managed to fail every single test Jefferson laid out.
What Jefferson Actually Said
The letter, dated 1787, was written to David Rittenhouse, a friend of Jefferson's and fellow member of the American Philosophical Society. According to the Guardian, Jefferson used it to lay out what he believed should be the guiding priorities of the young republic. The key line: "Peace should be our plan, and the payment of our debts, improvement of our constitutions and extension of agriculture our principal objects."
That's four things. Four very specific things. Peace. Debt reduction. Constitutional improvement. Support for agriculture. Jefferson wrote this while the Constitutional Convention was literally happening in Philadelphia, a convention he was following as closely as a three-week mail delay to Paris would allow. He didn't know when he wrote it that the delegates had already signed off on the Constitution that same day. He was writing into the void, hoping the new country would get it right.
Almost 240 years later, the letter has surfaced through the Raab Collection, a Pennsylvania-based historical documents dealer, with a guide price of $285,000. It was previously on display at Texas A&M University and comes packaged with a scientific book Jefferson gifted to Rittenhouse, which somehow managed to stay with the letter all this time. Nathan Raab, the company's president, told the Guardian he has never seen anything quite like it in his career.
The Scorecard Is Not Pretty
Let's run the numbers. Jefferson said peace should be the plan. The United States is currently fighting an unpopular war in Iran that, as the Guardian reports, endures into Trump's second term. Jefferson said pay off the debt. The Guardian reports the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion for the first time in American history under Trump's watch. Jefferson said improve the Constitution. Trump's administration has been described, including by his own allies, as running a "blitzkrieg" on constitutional norms. Jefferson said support agriculture. Trump is reportedly at odds with American farmers over his administration's treatment of the agricultural sector.
Four priorities. Zero executed. This is not a close call or a matter of interpretation. Jefferson wrote a checklist and Trump failed every item on it. The man who put a bronze Jefferson statue in the Rose Garden to celebrate American heritage has now managed to embody the exact opposite of what Jefferson was asking for, in writing, in 1787, from an ocean away.
Raab told the Guardian the parallels were impossible to ignore even setting aside partisan considerations. "The prescience here is that the same issues that the founding fathers were dealing with during the constitutional convention of the founding of our country are issues that still make headlines today," he said.
The Irony Is Physically on Display in the Rose Garden
Here is the detail that should make your head hurt a little. Trump didn't just vaguely admire Jefferson from a distance. According to the Guardian, he installed a lifesize bronze statue of the man in the White House Rose Garden in July, as part of the US semiquincentennial celebrations. Trump has frequently identified Jefferson as one of his political heroes.
So we have a president who likes Jefferson enough to commission a statue of him, put it in the most prominent outdoor space at his residence, and celebrate it publicly, while simultaneously running a foreign policy, fiscal policy, agricultural policy, and constitutional policy that Jefferson explicitly warned against in a document that has been sitting in a university in Texas this whole time. The statue is decorative. The philosophy is inconvenient. Trump picked one and ignored the other.
Raab pointed out that Jefferson wrote this letter without access to real-time information, that the convention had already concluded by the time he put quill to paper, and yet the warning still landed with astonishing accuracy across two and a half centuries. "He's giving in one broad stroke what he feels should be the priorities of the convention and the country," Raab told the Guardian. "The important warning that he offers at the end is just so relevant today, it's impossible to miss."
What $285,000 Buys You in 2026
The Raab Collection is asking $285,000 for the letter and the accompanying scientific book, which Jefferson gifted to Rittenhouse as a fellow scientist and astronomer. Raab told the Guardian that Jefferson, a famous book collector himself, sending books to another founding father and having the letter and book survive together is remarkable. He called it the most impressive Jefferson document his company has ever handled.
The Raab Collection has dealt in Jefferson documents before. The Guardian notes they sold a letter in 2024 revealing Jefferson's precarious personal finances, and last year they discovered a note he wrote to Virginia's governor in 1783 about citizens' rights to bear arms in revolutionary causes. The man wrote constantly, to everyone, about everything, and kept being right about most of it. You could build an entire policy platform out of Jefferson's correspondence alone. Somebody clearly has not tried.
For context, $285,000 is also roughly what the federal government spends in about 2.6 seconds at current debt levels. Jefferson would probably have something to say about that too.
The Dingo Take
Trump idolizes Jefferson the way a person idolizes a band but only knows one song. He likes the aesthetic, the revolutionary branding, the white marble gravitas. He put the statue up. He says the name. What he has not done, apparently ever, is read the correspondence, which is now available through a dealer in Pennsylvania for less than the cost of a Mar-a-Lago membership, if anyone in this administration is interested.
The thing about Jefferson's warning is that it wasn't complicated. He wasn't theorizing or hedging. He laid out four basic priorities for a functioning republic in plain 18th-century English and signed his name to it. Avoid war. Pay your debts. Strengthen the Constitution. Support farmers. That's it. That's the whole memo. The fact that nearly 240 years later a document dealer can hold up that letter and say, without any partisan spin, that every single item on that list is currently being violated by the president who claims Jefferson as a hero, is either the greatest historical irony of the modern era or a very expensive piece of evidence in an ongoing civic disaster. Possibly both.
Someone should buy the letter and mail a copy to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Frame it. Put it next to the statue. Maybe it'll sink in eventually. Though at the rate the debt is climbing, Jefferson might just rise out of that bronze and start walking.
Comments