The Gentlemen of Antwerp

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 31, 2026

 

Donald Trump is cheap in every sense of the word: cheap in that he is an infamous deadbeat who cheated his creditors; cheap in the sense of tacky; cheap in that he is the sort of man whose virtue, such as it is, can be overcome at no great expense—a cheap date.

 

Trump is a $40 fake Rolex made copious flesh.

 

Trump is so cheaply bribed that the bribes almost do not look like bribes, and they aren’t bribes in the conventional sense, notwithstanding only the fact that no court of law has found them to be such. They are moral bribes—trinkets—rather than economic bribes.

 

And you do not have to spend very much on that sort of thing. One need not be overboard. The pimped-out airplane from the Arab despot was a bit much, maybe. But the CEO of Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, bought the whole Swiss watch industry a better deal on tariffs with a desk clock that was not even solid gold but merely gold plated, along with a 1-kg bar of gold engraved with the word “PRESIDENT”—in case Trump, who seems to believe that there is something called the Islamic Republic of Japan and who conflates Vladimir Putin with Volodymyr Zelensky, finally forgets which office it is he holds.

 

The gemstone cartel known as the Antwerp World Diamond Center got its diamonds an exemption from Trump’s tariffs after offering up the merest of baubles, a hideously tacky ring with diamonds arranged in two big capital Ts and the numbers 45 and 47, references to Trump’s two terms as president. Trump in the pocket of a bunch of European diamond merchants: The antisemitic stereotypes thereby invoked must have been almost too much to bear for the Jew-hating cretins in Trump’s coalition, who surely would be muttering about some yarmulke-wearing malefactor

 

spawned in some estaminet of

 

Blistered in Palm Beach

 

Patched and peeled in Washington

 

if any of them had ever read a book that did not have pictures in it.

 

It is, to be sure, a real ring of power, but the power it expresses is not that of the president of the United States—it is the power of the Antwerp diamond cartel, which knows exactly how to tickle the ol’ hypothalamus when it comes to such a piteous figure as Trump.

 

Trump is hardly alone in being cheaply had. Sen. Bob Menendez gave it up for a little bit of gold and the down payment on a Mercedes C-Class—the starter Benz!—for his lady friend. He also hinted that he’d like an expensive watch. Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, whose conviction on corruption charges was overturned, accepted a Rolex from a favor-seeker. The traitor Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who spied for the Russians, sold himself for a couple of Rolexes and similar loot.

 

Rolexes are a thing when it comes to corrupt officials, but cash is still king, even if the amounts are relatively small: A Washington city councilman is on trial for corruption charges after being accused of accepting a mere $156,000 to redirect some $5.2 million in city contracts—a nice ROI for the bribe-payers, if the facts of the case are as prosecutors present them. Thrifty gentlemen in the District of Columbia managed to get out of $3 million in taxes for a mere $75,000 or so in emoluments. Federal prosecutors estimate that a corrupt USAID contracting officer received something in the neighborhood of $1 million in bribes in return for running a scheme that redirected some $550 million worth of contracts.

 

I’m a journalist, and $1 million is a lot of money to me, but the organized-crime standard for kickbacks is about 10 percent—and the USAID guy got less than two-tenths of 1 percent: chump change. Hell, those 70 corrupt housing authority guys in New York commanded kickbacks amounting to as much as 20 percent of the contract value in their 2025 bribery case.

 

No one really knows how wealthy Donald Trump and his family were before he was elected president—he lied pretty consistently about his wealth and has been known to say that his net worth varied with his mood. (“The heart is fickle above all things, and desperately wicked.”) Perennially over-leveraged, Trump spent much of his professional (“professional”) life walking a financial tightrope, but there is no doubting the vastness of his family’s wealth today, thanks in no small part to some pretty shady crypto stuff and unapologetic profiteering from his office.

 

Trump represents the ultimate vindication of “fake it ’til you make it.”

 

And so, of course, Trump does not need the gentlemen in Antwerp to buy him a diamond ring valued at a mere $35,000. He does not really need a corrupt petro-potentate to buy him an airplane, either, and he can afford all the fancy watches he likes. (Once a hawker of gawdy knockoff watches, Trump himself now favors timepieces from Vacheron Constantin, apparently the result of his wife’s uncharacteristically tasteful influence.) The point of the baubles is not their market value but their psychic value. What the Swiss et al. have discovered is that it is more efficient to spend a few dollars servicing Trump’s vanity than to spend a larger sum of money to get at him through purely economic means.

 

What that says about Trump is nothing good.

 

What it says about the Americans who twice elected him president is worse: They are not ambitious enough to be cheap, and they are not even free—they are marks who can be made to pay for the privilege of being fleeced and condescended to by a grifter who might have been lifted from the pages of a Sinclair Lewis novel.