Is Truth Social just too slow to load with your oppressive cellular data plan? Are you sick of scrolling vaccine conspiracy theories on your tired old iPhone? The Trump Organization, led by Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric, has you covered with its latest business venture: The family will license its name to a wireless cell service, christened Trump Mobile, and release an accompanying Trump-branded phone.
Trump Mobile is poised to offer one big, beautiful coverage plan priced at $47.45 a month—apparently with the same reach as America’s three major phone service carriers, which are AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. It boasts unlimited talk, text, and data, along with third-party roadside assistance and telehealth services (which are set to include virtual medical care and mechanisms for prescription medication ordering and delivery, but no specifics have been released). The plan will also offer free long-distance calling for members of the military and their families; civilians can place long-distance calls, too, with some restrictions—if you need to phone a friend in Guantanamo Bay, for example, your conversation will be capped at ten minutes.
You can go ahead and enroll in the Trump Mobile plan on your plebeian cellular device today. As for the branded smartphone, we’re not entirely sure when it will hit shelves: An official press release says it will drop this August, while the Trump Mobile website teases a September release date. In the meantime, here are five things we do know about the forthcoming T1 Phone 8002, which bears a signature gold skin and a name fit only for the world’s most resplendent graphing calculator smartphone.
1. It’s cheap, for a smartphone.
The T1’s price tag is pretty modest at $499, considering all the features it will supposedly provide (more on those later). It’s available for preorder with a $100 downpayment, but apparently not without headache. 404 Media reporter Joseph Cox tried to buy the phone this morning: He says the Trump Mobile website routed him to an error page and then charged his credit card $64.70 instead of $100. Then, he got an email letting him know that he’ll receive confirmation when his order ships, but he had never provided a shipping address. “It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone,” Cox writes.
2. It’s made in America, somehow?
US-based tech giants like Apple and Google have not yet found a way to manufacture their products on American soil—but the Trump Organization apparently has, claiming the T1 is “proudly designed and built in the United States.” It would be a Herculean task for an American manufacturer to produce a smartphone, given our existing infrastructure; Steve Jobs himself couldn’t pull it off. Tech reporters aren’t convinced that the Trump brothers have figured it out, either: “Frankly, it’s the whole ‘made in the USA’ bit that is the most unlikely thing about the T1,” The Verge’s David Pierce writes.
According to Rob Pegoraro, a DC-based tech reporter, there is one American-made smartphone on the market currently: Purism’s Liberty Phone, which retails for an eye-popping $2,000—well over the going rate for even a brand-new iPhone. And its technical specifications, or “specs,” leave a lot to be desired, offering just 4 GB of memory and 128 GB of storage. It is manufactured in California, but “even then, so many of the core components are not made in the US,” Pegoraro points out—including parts that are essential to its basic functioning, like the processor. He is skeptical, to say the least, that the TS1 will prove the triumph of affordable, sophisticated American smartphone manufacturing: “Maybe Donald Trump will have one handmade for himself, but whoever is putting down their credit cards and trying to order this phone—it might say ‘packaged in the USA,’ but ‘made in the USA,’ I have my doubts.”
3. Some of the tech is puzzling experts.
A list of the T1’s features highlights its operating system—Android 15—along with a 6.78-inch display (about the same size as an iPhone 16 Plus), 256GB of storage, and 5G capabilities. One conspicuous feature: The website advertises a 5,000-milliamp-hour “long life camera.” But as Pegoraro points out, “Milliamp hours is a battery life spec, not a camera processor, which is kind of important.” Plus, he says, the resolution of two of the three rear cameras is “way too small to make any sense for a modern phone.”
The Android 15 operating system is slightly outdated—Google’s new Android 16 OS launched this month—but Pegoraro calls that the “the least weird thing” about the product: “They’re only one version behind; that’s pretty good. Lots of cheap phone vendors can’t be bothered to do that much.”
4. The phone plan isn’t even a good deal.
Trump Mobile is a mobile-branded reseller: While its cell services are sold under the Trump name, it leases its network access from T-Mobile. Coming from a reseller, the $47.45 monthly plan cost is “not competitive at all,” Pegoraro says. “So if you sign up for that, you’re paying a Trump tax for wireless service with your favorite guy’s name on it.” For reference, plans through fellow mobile-branded reseller Mint Mobile start at $15 a month; Consumer Cellular coverage starts at $20.
5. Ethical concerns abound.
The Trump Mobile announcement comes days after the release of the president’s 2024 financial disclosures, which include more than $600 million in income from various Trump-branded business ventures including golf clubs and cryptocurrency. While these documents don’t reflect the revenue Trump has collected since taking office, he continues to peddle goods branded with his name and likeness, including sneakers and a Bible—last year, these products scored him millions in royalty payments. Trump himself also remains the largest shareholder of Trump Media and Technology Group—which owns Truth Social—although Don Jr. controls a trust in which the stock is held. “The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House,” writes New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker. The Trump family’s foray into the tech world looks like yet another cash grab.
Not to mention that oversight of Trump Mobile will fall to the Federal Communications Commission, which is headed up by Trump appointee and MAGA loyalist Brendan Carr. In conclusion, as Pegoraro puts it, “All this seems deeply weird.”
