Todd Spangler, reporting for Variety:

President Trump and his family are getting into the wireless business, in partnership with the three major U.S. carriers.

The Trump Organization on Monday announced Trump Mobile, which will offer 5G service with an unlimited plan (the “47 Plan”) priced at $47.45 per month. The new venture joins the lineup of the company’s other businesses, which span luxury hotels, golf clubs, casinos, retail, and other real estate properties. The president’s two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, made the announcement at a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

Customers can switch to Trump Mobile’s T1 Mobile service using their current phone. In addition, in August, Trump Mobile plans to release the “T1 Phone” — described as “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier.”

David Pierce has more details over at The Verge with an all-timer headline, “The Trump Mobile T1 Phone Looks Both Bad and Impossible”:

That’s about all I feel confident saying. Beyond that, all we have is a website that was clearly put together quickly and somewhat sloppily, a promise that the phone is “designed and built in the USA” that I absolutely do not believe, a picture that appears to be nearly 100 percent Photoshopped, and a list of specs that don’t make a lot of sense together. The existence of a “gold version” of the phone implies a not-gold version, but the Trump Mobile website doesn’t say anything more about that.

Here are the salient specs, according to the site:

  • 6.78-inch AMOLED display, with a punch hole for the camera
  • 120Hz refresh rate
  • Three cameras on the back, including a 50MP camera, a 2MP depth sensor, and a 2MP macro lens
  • 16MP selfie camera
  • a 5,000mAh battery (the Trump Mobile website actually says “5000mAh long life camera,” so I’m just assuming here)
  • 256GB of storage
  • 12GB of RAM (the site also calls this “storage,” which, sure)
  • Fingerprint sensor in the screen and face unlock
  • USB-C
  • Headphone jack
  • Android 15

I genuinely had no idea how to react to this news when I first read about it. I wasn’t shocked, I was laughing. Putting aside Trump’s inhumane actions as president, I find the man’s grifts increasingly hilarious. It began with Truth Social, his Mastodon clone that literally no one, not even his own vice president, uses regularly. Then it was the Trump cryptocurrency coin, which is perhaps the most out-in-the-open solicitation of bribes from any American president in the last 50 years. Now it’s the $50 mobile virtual network operator and a truly stupid-looking Chinese Android phone. Leave it to Trump to think of the most hysterical ways of nabbing his followers’ money.

Being, well, me, I went straight for the details. The Trump Mobile cellular plan is just deprioritized T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T cell service, and I think it’s pretty interesting that they didn’t choose just one carrier eager to bribe the president. But it’s also more expensive than those three carriers’ own MVNOs at $47.45 a month, a price tag chosen just because it includes the numbers 45 and 47. (Why not $45.47? Nobody will ever know.) On top of the usual levels of hilarity, Donald Trump Jr., with a straight face, came out and said the cell plan would “change the game,” which I’m almost positive is meant to be some kind of Steve Jobs cosplay. Downright hilarious.

The phone is much more interesting. It looks like something straight out of the Escobar phone company — the one with the Russian bikini model advertisements that eventually got shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation — but infinitely more entertaining because Trump’s loser sons are adamant the phone will be made in the United States. It’s only supposed to cost $500, comes in seemingly only a gold finish, requires a $100 reservation, and, according to the Trump people, will be out in September, alongside the presumably inferior iPhone 17 line. They really do have Apple beat — Cupertino doesn’t make phones with 5,000 milliampere-hour cameras.

If I had to guess, they’re buying cheap knockoff Chinese phones off Alibaba for $150 apiece, asking for some cheap gold-colored plastic castings, and flashing some gaudy app icons and wallpapers onto the phones before shipping them out to braindead Americans mentally challenged enough to spend $500 of their Social Security checks on their dear president’s latest scam. They aren’t just “Made in China,” they’re Chinese through and through — and certainly not with specifications even remotely close to what’s listed on Trump’s website. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the Android skin ships to customers with Mandarin Chinese selected as the default language. If you’ve ever seen one of those knockoff iPhones people sell on Wish, you’ll know what I mean.

That’s even if this device ships at all. I can totally see the Trump people slapping on a “Made in America” badge right before shipping the phones out to customers, but I don’t even think they’ll get that far. The fact that they’re taking “reservations” already triggers alarm bells, and as I wrote earlier, the whole thing screams like the Escobar phones from a few years ago. Here’s how the scam worked: The Escobar people, affiliated with the infamous drug lord’s brother, sent a bunch of rebranded iPhones and Royole FlexPai phones to some YouTubers, took orders for the phones, and then shipped out books instead of actual handsets. People never got their phones, but Escobar could prove it delivered something because the books were sent out. (Marques Brownlee has a great video about this, linked above.)

I’d say the Trump Mobile T1 will probably be shipped out to some hardcore Make America Great Again influencers — Catturd, Jack Posobiec, Steve Bannon, the works — collecting $100 deposits from elders with nothing better to spend their money on. Then, they’ll just mail out whatever comes to mind to customers, complete with a Made in America badge, and perhaps some SIM cards for their new Trump Mobile cell service. It’s a classic Trump grift, and there’s not much else to it. This phone isn’t even vaporware – it just doesn’t exist in any meaningful capacity, and the models they’ll eventually ship out to influencers are either nonexistent or bad Chinese phones that look nothing like the pictures. I wouldn’t put either past Trump.