On Thursday, President Donald Trump and his erstwhile friend, Elon Musk, had a public feud for the ages.
While Musk came out looking by far the more petulant and unhinged, no one who loves America could have felt anything but sadness as they watched the falling out unfold in real time on Musk and Trump’s respective social media platforms, X and Truth Social.
Indeed, resolving a feud of this magnitude might seem impossible at the moment. But if Trump and Musk wish to do it, they may look to a two-century-old example set by an even greater pair of American legends.
Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson forged one of history’s most interesting and important friendships. And posterity has benefited from it, for that friendship also produced one of history’s richest correspondences.
From 1777 until their simultaneous deaths on July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — the two Founders exchanged hundreds of letters on a variety of subjects, from politics and public policy to education and moral philosophy.
Nonetheless, Adams and Jefferson did not enjoy a half-century of unbroken amiability toward one another.
In fact, as noted by filmmaker and social media influencer Robby Starbuck on X Thursday, their relationship unfolded as follows: friendship, rivalry, estrangement, reconciliation, and friendship again.
It doesn’t need to be over for Trump and Elon. Dominant men often develop deep friction when they disagree. Let me give you a powerful historical example of a similar situation:
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were close friends during the American Revolution and they worked on… pic.twitter.com/K8GJjMzwbQ
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 5, 2025
Thus, if legends of that stature can overcome their pride and rediscover what once united them, then anyone can.
Moreover, without exaggerating the similarities, one does find parallels between Adams-Jefferson and Trump-Musk.
On one hand, we have Adams — principled, pugnacious, misunderstood, and older than Jefferson by eight years. For present purposes, Adams may play the role of Trump.
Jefferson, on the other hand, was a man of science, deeply devoted to free speech, but also sensitive, averse to confrontation, and not very good at it when it happened. That sounds like Musk.
“I do not love difficulties,” Jefferson wrote to Adams’ wife Abigail in 1785. “I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post.”
In short, Adams and Jefferson had very different temperaments. Indeed, they recognized as much, and it helped forge their friendship.
In 1776, the two men sat on the committee organized for the purpose of drafting the Declaration of Independence. As Adams recalled late in life, he took the lead in ensuring that Jefferson drafted the document.
“Reason 1st,” Adams wrote in 1822, remembering his world-changing conversation with Jefferson nearly half a century earlier. “You are a Virginian, and Virginia ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2d. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; You are very much otherwise. Reason 3d: You can write ten times better than I can.”
In other words, Adams recognized Jefferson’s strengths, acknowledged his own shortcomings, and set aside his pride. How many other statesmen would have deferred to a younger colleague and thereby sacrificed the glory of drafting that document?
The Adams-Jefferson friendship truly blossomed, however, a decade later. In 1784, Jefferson sailed for France, where he eventually replaced Benjamin Franklin as U.S. minister to that government. Adams held the same post in England, which allowed him and Abigail to visit Jefferson in Paris.
Alas, in September 1782, Jefferson’s wife Martha had died at their home in Monticello. The Adamses helped lift the grieving widower’s spirits — that is, until they returned to England.
“The departure of your family has left me in the dumps,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in May 1785. “My afternoons hang heavily on me.”
Meanwhile, Jefferson maintained a lively and, at times, flirtatious correspondence with Abigail. (The letters contained nothing that 18th-century readers would have found scandalous.) When Jefferson sent for his nine-year-old daughter Polly in 1787, Mrs. Adams greeted the young girl upon her arrival in London (accompanied by a slightly older slave girl named Sally Hemings). Abigail grew very fond of Polly Jefferson during the short time that Polly stayed with the Adamses.
In short, Jefferson built a friendship not only with his colleague but with the entire Adams family.
Politics, however, eventually came between the two men.
After returning to America, Adams won election to the vice presidency. Jefferson, on the other hand, served as secretary of state. When Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton tried expanding the powers of the new federal government, using the British system as his model, Jefferson joined his Virginia friend James Madison in opposition to Hamilton, and the Founding Fathers split into parties, Federalist and Republican.
Adams, meanwhile, had no love for Hamilton. But Adams also deemed Jefferson, Madison, and the Republicans reckless in their early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, which Adams correctly predicted would end in disaster. That political schism strained the Adams-Jefferson friendship.
During Adams’ one-term presidency (1797-1801), Jefferson and Madison vehemently opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts (yes, that Alien Act). The two Republicans also abhorred what they rightly perceived as enthusiasm for war with France among members of Adams’ Cabinet.
The severing of the Adams-Jefferson relationship occurred in 1800-01, when Jefferson defeated his erstwhile friend for the presidency. In bitterness, Adams responded with last-minute judicial appointments designed to frustrate the incoming Jefferson administration.
The friendship appeared over until 1804, when Polly’s death at age 25 brought a letter of sympathy from Abigail.
Jefferson, however, used Abigail’s letter as an excuse to dredge up political grievances.
“I can say with truth that one act of mr Adams’s life, and one only, ever gave me a moment’s personal displeasure. I did consider his last appointments to office as personally unkind,” Jefferson wrote.
That comment called forth an exchange of five more letters between Jefferson and Abigail Adams that eventually came to the former president’s attention.
“The whole of this Correspondence was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion. Last Evening and this Morning at the desire of Mrs Adams I read the whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place,” Adams wrote in the postscript to a letter dated Oct. 25, 1804.
That sounds like the end of a friendship — and it was. Jefferson and Adams did not correspond again for more than seven years.
Then, on New Year’s Day 1812, Adams, with encouragement from a mutual friend, sent Jefferson a brief letter.
Jefferson responded with far more enthusiasm and grace than he had shown Abigail in 1804.
“A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties & dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us & yet passing harmless under our bark we knew not how, we rode through the storm with heart & hand, and made a happy port,” Jefferson wrote.
In other words, it only took one gesture, and Adams made it. When he received that gesture, Jefferson responded as if he had thought about writing to his former friend for years.
From there, Adams and Jefferson spent the next 14 years exchanging letters on every subject under the sun. In fact, of the hundreds of letters they wrote to one another over a period of nearly 50 years, roughly half of them were penned between 1812 and 1826. That constitutes as vibrant a retirement correspondence as any two Americans have ever produced.
When Adams died on July 4, 1826, newspapers reported his final words as “Jefferson still lives.” Jefferson, however, had died earlier that same day.
Few events in American history have inspired more commentaries on God’s special providence for America than did the simultaneous deaths of Jefferson and Adams on the Declaration of Independence’s 50th anniversary.
And they died as friends. They might not have, if they had refused to set aside their pride. But they did.
Of course, one must concede that the Trump-Musk analogy breaks down at several points.
For one thing, Adams and Jefferson always regarded one another as peers — “fellow laborers,” as Jefferson put it. Trump, however, is the president, and 25 years Musk’s senior.
Likewise, Adams and Jefferson had extensive political experience from a young age. Trump also has shown political savvy, whereas Musk undeniably rates as a political novice.
Finally, Adams and Jefferson had a half-century-long friendship. The Trump-Musk alliance, on the other hand, lasted less than a year.
Nonetheless, if Trump and Musk needed a model for reconciliation, Adams and Jefferson provided it. Now, let us hope that the greatest man of our age, Trump, and a man with his own pretensions to greatness, Musk, may put aside the recent ugliness and do what they have done best: work together to make America great again.
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