Not everyone thinks I should. I\u2019ve been told that covering Trump Mobile is \u201cplaying into his hands,\u201d that \u201cthis obvious con [doesn\u2019t need] any more publicity,\u201d and that \u201cwe don\u2019t need to read about it literally every week.\u201d And those are just the nice messages \u2014 you don\u2019t want to see some of the other ones.<\/p>\n
Still, I think it\u2019s a fair question. Why am I here week in, week out, writing about a phone that, as best as we can tell, doesn\u2019t actually exist? Why didn\u2019t we just call it bad and impossible<\/a> and move on with our lives?<\/p>\n The short answer is: because it matters.<\/p>\n The long answer is: We can\u2019t move on because this is still playing out, and it still needs reporting. If the T1 Phone 8002 would just arrive at buyers\u2019 houses and turn out to be a real, probably quite bad, smartphone, that would be that. But no one has the phone yet. No one has even seen the phone yet. And Trump Mobile has gone suspiciously silent, with no updates in months to its website or social media profiles.<\/p>\n This also sits squarely in The Verge\u2019s lane. You want us to stick to phones? This is it! It\u2019s a phone \u2014 at least in name \u2014 and we want to know what\u2019s going on with it.<\/p>\n In fact, it sits in the eye of a perfect storm of Verge-iness. It\u2019s a phone, and we cover those. It\u2019s probably vaporware, and we\u2019re always happy to call out products that will never actually exist. It creates a pretty clear regulatory problem for the FCC<\/a>, and we love pointing opportunities for Brendan Carr to be a dummy. And, yes, it\u2019s about politics \u2014 The Verge covers that<\/a>. Always has, always will.<\/p>\n But more than that, it\u2019s something that\u2019s worth calling out, and calling out often. In the grand scheme of the Donald Trump administration, a gold Android phone that won\u2019t actually be made in the US is pretty small fry. But it\u2019s emblematic of empty promises and naked grifts, of baseless claims that they don\u2019t expect to ever be called out on. This is an administration presiding over one of the biggest tech industry booms<\/a> (bubbles?) in decades, that had a tech bro as one of its chief advisers<\/a>, and that welcomed half of Silicon Valley at the inauguration<\/a>, and it doesn\u2019t know that you can\u2019t build $500 Android flagships in the United States?<\/p>\n Trump Mobile, for the third week in a row, did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not everyone thinks I should. I\u2019ve been told that covering Trump Mobile is \u201cplaying into his hands,\u201d that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[166,165,3,12074,1343,111,172,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-291570","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-gadgets","9":"tag-mobile","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-phones","12":"tag-policy","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-tech","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}