![\"The](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2025\/06\/t1-phone-trump.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe original T1 Phone design was certainly\u2026 unique. Image: Trump Mobile<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d already reported on the possibility that Donald Trump might enter the mobile market, after trademark applications for \u201cTrump\u201d and \u201cT1\u201d were filed in the US. That meant that Trump Mobile itself \u2014 a small mobile operator, piggybacking on T-Mobile\u2019s cell service, with an overpriced $47.45 monthly plan \u2014 wasn\u2019t a total surprise, besides the fact that most presidents don\u2019t own mobile networks.<\/p>\n
The more The Verge team dug into the launch that day, the stranger it got. Trump Mobile\u2019s website said the phone would launch in September 2025, but a press release from the Trump Organization<\/a> 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\u2019s 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<\/a> it was answered by Omega Auto Care. Later that day, Eric Trump popped up on right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson\u2019s podcast to show off his \u201cgolden phone,\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n As for the claims it would be produced domestically? It took less than two weeks for Trump Mobile to walk back<\/a> its \u201cmade in the US\u201d claims, updating the website to say the phone is \u201cproudly American\u201d and has \u201cAmerican hands behind every device.\u201d When I eventually spoke to two company executives<\/a>, Don Hendrickson and Eric Thomas, the following February \u2014 after months of sending weekly unanswered emails \u2014 they admitted that the phone fell short of Federal Trade Commission regulations around marketing products as US-made.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are certain things that you have to do in order to say \u2018made in America,\u2019\u201d Hendrickson said, before claiming that the company had only ever described US manufacturing as a \u201cgoal.\u201d This, at least, is flatly false: The Trump Organization press release is still live today, and says the T1 \u201cis a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem for Trump Mobile is that the FTC regulates<\/a> whether a product can be marketed as \u201cmade in the USA,\u201d and it requires \u201call or virtually all\u201d of a product\u2019s components to be American-made. With global electronics manufacturing overwhelmingly centered in Asia, that\u2019s a difficult bar for a smartphone to clear. Instead, Trump Mobile now says the T1 Phone is \u201cassembled\u201d in the US, which Hendrickson and Thomas told me takes place in Miami. What exactly that means remains unclear. Thomas told me that it\u2019s \u201cdefinitely more than slapping a cover on the phone,\u201d 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 \u2014 the agency also regulates claiming a product is assembled in the US, which requires a \u201csubstantial transformation,\u201d going above and beyond \u201csimple screwdriver assembly.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump Mobile may be assembling the T1 Phone, but it\u2019s unlikely the company truly designed or built it \u2014 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\u2019s approach from day one, comparing the initial spec sheet to phones from a handful of budget Android brands<\/a> like Doogee, Ulefone, and Revvl, to see if any looked like a close match.<\/p>\n None particularly did, not helped by the fact that the phone\u2019s 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 \u201c5,000mAh long life camera,\u201d which makes absolutely no goddamn sense given it\u2019s describing the phone\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Eric Thomas gave me a brief glimpse of a pre-production T1 in February. Back then, the US flag had the right number of stripes. Screenshot: Dominic Preston \/ The Verge<\/p>\n 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 \u201copen the kimono\u201d 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 \u2014 the first time any journalist saw the phone, which looked little like any version we\u2019d seen before. Among the few constants were the garish golden finish and the American flag emblazoned on the rear, plus an oversized \u201cT1\u201d logo that disappeared by the final design, which wasn\u2019t officially revealed for another two months. I only saw the phone for less than a minute \u2014 and over a Google Meet call \u2014 but the grainy footage I captured was enough to finally find the Trump phone\u2019s match: the HTC U24 Pro<\/a>.<\/p>\n Launched in 2024 for \u20ac549 (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<\/a>, we know that the innards are uncannily similar too. HTC told me that it \u201cdoes not design or manufacture phones for third parties,\u201d so you can\u2019t blame it for the Trump phone. Still, the company wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s recent phones were built by an ODM. HTC didn\u2019t make the Trump phone, but maybe the ODM it used had.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d only tell me that it was made in a \u201cfavored\u201d nation, and that the goal in component sourcing was \u201cto remove as much of this from China as possible.\u201d The truth is, we still don\u2019t 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<\/a>. You can make your own mind up from there.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve spent more than seven months digging into Trump Mobile, poking at this story week in, week out, to figure out what\u2019s really going on. Of course, I wouldn\u2019t 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 \u201clater this year,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe technology business is more difficult than some may realize,\u201d Trump Mobile CEO Pat O\u2019Brien told CNN<\/a> 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 \u2014 all of which took place months after the phone was supposed to launch in the first place.<\/p>\n All that time, Trump Mobile has been patiently collecting $100 deposits from everyone willing to order the phone, though we don\u2019t know how many people that is. Viral reports claimed as many as 600,000 orders had been placed \u2014 meaning a tidy $60 million payday from deposits alone \u2014 but proved to be entirely lacking evidence<\/a>. A breach of the company\u2019s website<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n That potential payout \u2014 at most $2.7 million or so from deposits, $13.6 million if every order converts into a $499 purchase \u2014 sounds like chump change on the Trump scale, though it doesn\u2019t factor in whatever money the business is making from its $47.45 monthly phone plan. \u201cWe\u2019re in the razor blade business, we\u2019re not in the razor business,\u201d Hendrickson told me, repeating a common business clich\u00e9 and adding that the T1 Phone itself isn\u2019t the \u201cprofit center\u201d for the company.<\/p>\n That makes more sense given that he, Thomas, and O\u2019Brien also run Liberty Mobile<\/a>, a Liberty Bell-themed, red-white-and-blue MVNO that plays to patriots and runs on T-Mobile. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n \u201cLiberty Mobile is umbilically connected to Trump [Mobile],\u201d Hendrickson told me, explaining that it\u2019s 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\u2019t appear to be doing very much at all. Hendrickson explained that even the idea for the company was Liberty\u2019s, a pitch he and the other executives made to the Trump family after running a similarly branded service with boxer Canelo \u00c1lvarez<\/a> \u2014 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\u2019Brien.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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 \u2014 another Trump Mobile claim that turned out to be false. As for Donald Trump himself, he\u2019s 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\u2019s length and ensures that there\u2019s no conflict of interest, if you\u2019d like to believe that.<\/p>\n I fear in the course of my reporting I\u2019ve fallen out of Trump Mobile\u2019s good graces. Since I spoke to Hendrickson and Thomas in February, I\u2019ve sent them at least 13 emails to add to the countless from before our call. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n This is what T1 Phone buyers will \u2014 some day, eventually, maybe \u2014 receive from Trump Mobile. Screenshot: Trump Mobile<\/p>\n That continued silence is why, one year on from Trump Mobile\u2019s first announcement, so many questions remain. One in particular stands out: Is the Trump phone real?<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, CNET<\/a>, and the YouTuber Quinn Nelson<\/a>. The T1 successfully picked up certification from the FCC<\/a> to launch in the US, and from Google<\/a> to connect to its Google Play app store. Verge senior reviewer Allison Johnson has even held the phone in her hand<\/a> \u2014 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\u2019t evidence of anything you couldn\u2019t pull off with a few production samples. They prove that the T1 technically exists, but not that it\u2019s an actual product on the market.<\/p>\n More than a month since it supposedly started shipping, I still can\u2019t find a single regular, non-media buyer with a credible claim to have received their phone. There isn\u2019t 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\u2019t be shocked if I was back here in 12 months\u2019 time, asking the same questions all over again. The Trump phone is real because we\u2019ve seen it. The Trump phone isn\u2019t real because almost no one else has.<\/p>\n Got inside information on Trump Mobile or the Trump phone? 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