In June 2025, Donald Trump Jr. proudly announced the founding of a mobile operator called Trump Mobile, including a mobile virtual network operator offering services for $47.45 a month, and a gaudy-looking, gold-colored, $499 smartphone that was supposedly going to be manufactured in the United States.
The device, as experts quickly pointed out at the time, looked an awful lot like a mid-tier Android phone from a Chinese smartphone company, drawing plenty of skepticism.
But despite promising that the phone would be released in 2025, the company was seemingly caught off guard by the dawn of a new year, with the Financial Times reporting on December 31 that Trump Mobile was delaying the launch of the handheld, dubbed T1, blaming the government shutdown. (How exactly the shutdown impacted the private business remains unclear.)
Beyond having embarrassingly little to show and failing to abide by its own deadlines, the company has walked back one of its biggest claims, a clear attempt to distinguish itself from its competitors. As the Associated Press points out, after announcing that the T1 would be made entirely in the US, the company’s website now claims the device will have an “American-proud” design — a meaningless tagline that makes it sound a lot like the device, if it ever gets made, will be built somewhere else.
It’s likely that Trump Jr. finally realized that producing a smartphone in the US could be far more expensive, making such a $499 device majorly unprofitable. That’s something we’ve known for quite some time now, as exemplified by Apple’s plans to move production of its US iPhones from China to India. The plans greatly angered his dad, president Donald Trump, who insisted it was possible to build iPhones in America by boosting domestic manufacturing by heavily taxing imports, forcing Apple to adjust its supply chains.’
Trump’s monetary policies and steep tariffs have driven up costs, making a US-built smartphone an even taller ask.
“The concept of making iPhones in the US is a nonstarter,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said last year, estimating that a price tag for an iPhone could triple if made in the US.
In other words, Trump Mobile failing to live up to its promises since its founding last summer isn’t surprising in the least.
“We have always been quite skeptical about this phone,” International Data Corp. analyst Francisco Jeronimo told the Associated Press.
For the time being, Trump Mobile is slinging used iPhones and Samsung Galaxy smartphones for prices up to $630.
“Maybe they changed their strategy and figured out they are better off just selling refurbished phones,” Jeronimo added.
Nobody knows whether the T1 is pure vaporware — the company is still collecting $100 deposits — or a misguided attempt to cash in on Trump’s unsuspecting supporters, who may not be clued in to the fact that they could be investing in a middling foreign-made smartphone.
Besides, $500 gets you a pretty decent phone these days — without ostentatious gold and a close affiliation with a president who has a decades-long track record of launching and sinking well over a dozen businesses.
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