A remarkably prescient letter written by Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, advising how the newly created country could prosper, has been put up for sale by a private collector. The handwritten document from 1787 warns specifically against many of the missteps Donald Trump has taken to drag down his own second term of office. Written in Paris, where Jefferson was the fledgling government’s minister to France, the note to David Rittenhouse, a friend and fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, muses on the priorities and principles he believed future presidents should follow.
Previously on display at Texas A&M University, the letter and a book described as “a major European scientific work”, an accompanying gift from Jefferson to Rittenhouse, have a guide price of $285,000 through the Raab Collection, a Pennsylvania-based dealer in historical artifacts and documents. Almost 240 years later, Trump, who has frequently hailed Jefferson as one of his political heroes, and installed a lifesize bronze statue of him in the White House Rose Garden in July to mark the US semiquincentennial, appears to have eschewed every element of his predecessor’s advice. His hugely unpopular war in Iran endures; the national debt has surpassed $40tn for the first time; Trump’s “blitzkrieg” on the constitution continues; and he is at odds with American farmers over his administration’s treatment of the agricultural sector.
Nathan Raab, president of the Raab Collection, said it was difficult not to draw parallels between Jefferson’s caution contained in a highly personal document drafted barely a decade after the dawn of the new nation, and the volatility of politics in 2026. Of all the issues that have come and gone – isolation, war, peace – on the other end spending and debt have remained.” Jefferson’s letter covers more ground than only his thoughts on the nation’s future direction. He shares with Rittenhouse, a fellow scientist and avid astronomer who built precision telescopes and early models of the solar system, his love of “the west”, and fear of another conflict with England four years after the end of the revolutionary war.
He’s not saying, ‘So and so said this, and therefore we must counter with this message.’ He’s giving in one broad stroke what he feels should be the priorities of the convention and the country. But he certainly didn’t have updated information, which is illustrated by the fact that the day he wrote this letter, the convention finished. He wouldn’t know for weeks.” Raab’s company has handled numerous Jefferson documents previously, including the sale in 2024 of a letter written in 1802 revealing his precarious financial situation, and last year’s uncovering of a note he wrote to Virginia’s then governor Benjamin Harrison in 1783 expounding the rights of citizens to bear arms in revolutionary causes.
But Raab said he has never seen anything as impressive as the letter and book given to Rittenhouse. He’s talking to a prominent scientist as well. I think it’s intentional that he saved that to the end of the letter.
And the idea that Jefferson, a very famous book buyer and collector, is sending books to another founding father, David Rittenhouse, and the book is still together with the letter, that’s just incredible.”
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