From the day it was announced, on June 16th, 2025, the Trump phone sounded ridiculous. The T1 Phone 8002 (gold version), as it was officially called, was a combination of contradictory specs, product images that were clearly not photographs of a real phone, and the worrying requirement of a $100 deposit to secure a preorder of a $499 phone with no release date. But none of Trump Mobile’s outlandish announcements were as bold as the claim that the phone would be “designed and built in the United States.”
The US has next to no phone manufacturing infrastructure, few engineers with the required expertise, and little of the affordable, flexible mass labor that makes building electronics possible at scale in China, India, and across southeast Asia. Only one company currently makes a phone in the US, the Purism Liberty Phone, and it costs $1,999. The idea that Trump Mobile could build a phone for a quarter of the price in three months or less sounded impossible.
A year later, that’s proven to be true. The phone has changed form and shape so many times that I’ve had trouble keeping track of it — and I was keeping track of it, checking in every week with Trump Mobile, asking what the T1 Phone was, if it would actually be made in the States, and when it would ship. Because, a year on from its debut, it still hasn’t shipped.
But what is the Trump phone? I am asking that quite literally, because even after a year, I still have more questions than answers. Where is it really made? Why has it been repeatedly delayed? And will the regular folks who slapped down $100 for their golden phone ever see it arrive? I still don’t know, but I’ve spent the last 12 months trying to find out.
I remember exactly where I was when the T1 Phone was announced. I was at my desk, frantically trying to get my head around the news that the Trump family was launching a golden phone, emblazoned with the US flag, which it claimed would be made in the USA.
I’d already reported on the possibility that Donald Trump might enter the mobile market, after trademark applications for “Trump” and “T1” were filed in the US. That meant that Trump Mobile itself — a small mobile operator, piggybacking on T-Mobile’s cell service, with an overpriced $47.45 monthly plan — wasn’t a total surprise, besides the fact that most presidents don’t own mobile networks.
The more The Verge team dug into the launch that day, the stranger it got. Trump Mobile’s website said the phone would launch in September 2025, but a press release from the Trump Organization claimed it would arrive in August. There was a press conference, as Don Jr. and Eric Trump squeezed onto an uncomfortably small stage in New York’s Trump Tower alongside three Trump Mobile executives. They barely spoke about the phone itself, but instead promised that subscribers to the mobile plan would benefit from perks including international texting, roadside assistance, and telemedicine appointments. When The Verge boss Nilay Patel phoned the Trump Mobile call center, he reached a representative of the company who knew little of the phone except that it was being made in the US; when Reuters phoned the same number it was answered by Omega Auto Care. Later that day, Eric Trump popped up on right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson’s podcast to show off his “golden phone,” only to briefly flash what was quite clearly an iPhone in a gold case in front of the camera. This would not be the only time Trump Mobile tried to pass off another phone as the T1.
As for the claims it would be produced domestically? It took less than two weeks for Trump Mobile to walk back its “made in the US” claims, updating the website to say the phone is “proudly American” and has “American hands behind every device.” When I eventually spoke to two company executives, Don Hendrickson and Eric Thomas, the following February — after months of sending weekly unanswered emails — they admitted that the phone fell short of Federal Trade Commission regulations around marketing products as US-made.
“There are certain things that you have to do in order to say ‘made in America,’” Hendrickson said, before claiming that the company had only ever described US manufacturing as a “goal.” This, at least, is flatly false: The Trump Organization press release is still live today, and says the T1 “is a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States.”
The problem for Trump Mobile is that the FTC regulates whether a product can be marketed as “made in the USA,” and it requires “all or virtually all” of a product’s components to be American-made. With global electronics manufacturing overwhelmingly centered in Asia, that’s a difficult bar for a smartphone to clear. Instead, Trump Mobile now says the T1 Phone is “assembled” in the US, which Hendrickson and Thomas told me takes place in Miami. What exactly that means remains unclear. Thomas told me that it’s “definitely more than slapping a cover on the phone,” estimating that the phone reaches the US facility in 10 or so parts. We can only trust that the company is meeting FTC guidelines here too — the agency also regulates claiming a product is assembled in the US, which requires a “substantial transformation,” going above and beyond “simple screwdriver assembly.”
Trump Mobile may be assembling the T1 Phone, but it’s unlikely the company truly designed or built it — or at least not from scratch. Only the largest phone companies really do, the rest working with original design manufacturers (ODMs), which create hardware based on key specs and target price points. We suspected this had been Trump Mobile’s approach from day one, comparing the initial spec sheet to phones from a handful of budget Android brands like Doogee, Ulefone, and Revvl, to see if any looked like a close match.
None particularly did, not helped by the fact that the phone’s spec sheet was hard to make sense of. The low-quality images looked more like early production renders than a finished product, there were no details on the chipset powering the phone, and it claimed to feature a “5,000mAh long life camera,” which makes absolutely no goddamn sense given it’s describing the phone’s camera by using a battery spec. The spec sheet got stranger two weeks later, when the company stopped claiming the T1 was made in the USA. The obvious errors were fixed, but the display shrunk from an industry-standard 6.78 inches to a less common 6.25. This suddenly appeared to be an entirely different phone, and a more unusual one at that.
Everything changed when I spoke to Hendrickson and Thomas in February, the first time anyone in the company acknowledged my repeated pleas for answers. Throughout an hourlong call in which Hendrickson repeatedly promised to “open the kimono” on the workings of the company, I stared at my own webcam image as the two executives left their cameras off. Finally, three-quarters of an hour in, for a few brief minutes Thomas switched on his video feed, revealing a nondescript hotel room and a near-production model of the T1 — the first time any journalist saw the phone, which looked little like any version we’d seen before. Among the few constants were the garish golden finish and the American flag emblazoned on the rear, plus an oversized “T1” logo that disappeared by the final design, which wasn’t officially revealed for another two months. I only saw the phone for less than a minute — and over a Google Meet call — but the grainy footage I captured was enough to finally find the Trump phone’s match: the HTC U24 Pro.
Launched in 2024 for €549 (around $600 at the time), the U24 Pro is an almost exact match for the T1. The two phones share nearly identical spec sheets, differing only in battery size and charging speed, even including 3.5mm headphone jacks and microSD ports, increasingly unusual features in a modern phone. The shape is the same, right down to the distinctive arrangement of the speaker and sensors above the display. And thanks to teardowns of both phones by iFixit, we know that the innards are uncannily similar too. HTC told me that it “does not design or manufacture phones for third parties,” so you can’t blame it for the Trump phone. Still, the company wouldn’t confirm whether it had actually designed or manufactured the U24 Pro itself. HTC sold most of its smartphone business to Google in 2017, and it has long been assumed that HTC’s recent phones were built by an ODM. HTC didn’t make the Trump phone, but maybe the ODM it used had.
When we spoke, I asked Hendrickson and Thomas where the Trump phone was built before it reached Miami; the pair declined to comment. Cagily, they’d only tell me that it was made in a “favored” nation, and that the goal in component sourcing was “to remove as much of this from China as possible.” The truth is, we still don’t know where the phone is made, or where most of its components came from. But we do know that it looks just like the U24 Pro, inside and out. And we know that the U24 Pro was made in China. You can make your own mind up from there.
I’ve spent more than seven months digging into Trump Mobile, poking at this story week in, week out, to figure out what’s really going on. Of course, I wouldn’t have had all that time to dig if the company had simply released the phone on time. It missed those August and September release dates with barely a word, quietly updated the website to say “later this year,” then let 2025 slip by entirely. In February I was told it might be ready to ship in March. In May, the company said it was ready to ship and would fulfill every preorder within the next several weeks. That was over a month ago, and the two phones ordered by The Verge are still nowhere to be seen.
“The technology business is more difficult than some may realize,” Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien told CNN last month, while Hendrickson and Thomas blamed the delay on a variety of factors, including the government shutdown, resulting FCC certification delays, and the 2026 Lunar New Year celebrations — all of which took place months after the phone was supposed to launch in the first place.
All that time, Trump Mobile has been patiently collecting $100 deposits from everyone willing to order the phone, though we don’t know how many people that is. Viral reports claimed as many as 600,000 orders had been placed — meaning a tidy $60 million payday from deposits alone — but proved to be entirely lacking evidence. A breach of the company’s website may have revealed the real, less impressive figure: The leaked customer data appeared to show a mere 27,224 possible preorders. And since one security researcher noted that an entry was made every time someone reached the final stage of the order process, whether they paid or not, the true number could be even lower.
That potential payout — at most $2.7 million or so from deposits, $13.6 million if every order converts into a $499 purchase — sounds like chump change on the Trump scale, though it doesn’t factor in whatever money the business is making from its $47.45 monthly phone plan. “We’re in the razor blade business, we’re not in the razor business,” Hendrickson told me, repeating a common business cliché and adding that the T1 Phone itself isn’t the “profit center” for the company.
That makes more sense given that he, Thomas, and O’Brien also run Liberty Mobile, a Liberty Bell-themed, red-white-and-blue MVNO that plays to patriots and runs on T-Mobile. Sound familiar?
“Liberty Mobile is umbilically connected to Trump [Mobile],” Hendrickson told me, explaining that it’s the company registered with each state, the one paying the various taxes and fees required to operate as a carrier, and the one with the engineering staff to make the service run. To hear him describe it, Trump Mobile itself doesn’t appear to be doing very much at all. Hendrickson explained that even the idea for the company was Liberty’s, a pitch he and the other executives made to the Trump family after running a similarly branded service with boxer Canelo Álvarez — also complete with cheap, rebranded phones sold at a markup. They sweeten the pot further by throwing in free phone protection plans with Omega insurance and roadside assistance from Drive America, both of which are owned by Ensurety Ventures, a separate company that just so happens to also be run by Pat O’Brien.
It’s not clear how involved the actual Trumps are, though I suspect not very. Sure, Don Jr. and Eric were there when the company was launched and did the media rounds that day, and you’ll see both their faces plastered on the Trump Mobile website, but neither has been doing publicity since then. Hendrickson and Thomas declined to tell me how active the Trump brothers are in day-to-day operations, though when I pushed, they hinted they could arrange an interview with Don Jr. and Eric themselves — another Trump Mobile claim that turned out to be false. As for Donald Trump himself, he’s kept his distance from the whole enterprise. Officially he handed over control of the Trump Organization to his sons shortly before the start of his first term, placing it in a trust that ostensibly keeps him at arm’s length and ensures that there’s no conflict of interest, if you’d like to believe that.
I fear in the course of my reporting I’ve fallen out of Trump Mobile’s good graces. Since I spoke to Hendrickson and Thomas in February, I’ve sent them at least 13 emails to add to the countless from before our call. They’ve replied to one, directing me to a media manager who now also ignores me. I never got my interview with Don Jr. and Eric Trump, nor a promised review sample of the T1.
That continued silence is why, one year on from Trump Mobile’s first announcement, so many questions remain. One in particular stands out: Is the Trump phone real?
There clearly is a phone, even a few of them. Days after promising to ship out all orders, Trump Mobile began sending media samples and paid orders to NBC, CNET, and the YouTuber Quinn Nelson. The T1 successfully picked up certification from the FCC to launch in the US, and from Google to connect to its Google Play app store. Verge senior reviewer Allison Johnson has even held the phone in her hand — another tech reporter she ran into at an event had the device. But a few certification tests and a handful of phones in circulation aren’t evidence of anything you couldn’t pull off with a few production samples. They prove that the T1 technically exists, but not that it’s an actual product on the market.
More than a month since it supposedly started shipping, I still can’t find a single regular, non-media buyer with a credible claim to have received their phone. There isn’t any meaningful evidence that these phones have been made at scale and are being sold to real customers, real people who paid real $100 deposits all those months ago. It could still be weeks or months before they receive their phones; perhaps they never will. I wouldn’t be shocked if I was back here in 12 months’ time, asking the same questions all over again. The Trump phone is real because we’ve seen it. The Trump phone isn’t real because almost no one else has.
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