I bought the Trump phone 3 months ago, and I’ve got nothing

On June 16, 2025, I pre-ordered an Android smartphone. I’ve done this dozens of times before in my life, but this time was a little different. On that day, I was pre-ordering a phone that I didn’t want and had every reason to believe I would never actually see. The device in question was the T1 Phone, the first phone from a brand new company called Trump Mobile.

Trump Mobile is both a new carrier and phone company started by President Donald Trump’s sons, Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump. The T1 Phone was, at the time, sold as a made-in-America, gold-plated Android phone that looked alarmingly close to an iPhone. On the back was an enormous “T1” logo above an American flag.

However, who knows how real this phone actually is? As far as I know, no one outside of the Trump Mobile team has actually seen one. I certainly don’t have one. In fact, I have no correspondence about the status of my pre-order, no confirmed delivery date — I can’t even log in to my account at TrumpMobile.com to view my order. And it’s been three months.

I’m beginning to think this might be a scam, guys.

When I placed my pre-order for the Trump phone on June 16, I got a receipt for my deposit of $100. You can see the receipt below. I blocked out the provided password out of an abundance of caution, but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t work anyway:

This is the only email I have received from care@trumpmobile.com. It is the only email I’ve received from literally any account with the “@trumpmobile.com” address and the only email I’ve received at the unique email address we made specifically for this transaction. Over the past three months, there have been zero updates on my purchase.

When I attempt to log in at TrumpMobile.com using my email address and the provided temporary password, I get an error that says “Invalid Username or Password.” When I click the Forgot Password link on that page, another error pops up that says, “No data found based on the provided information.” Thankfully, there’s a support number you can call: 888-TRUMP45. I gave this number a ring and, after selecting English as my language instead of Spanish (something I found delightfully ironic considering the xenophobic, anti-immigrant nature of Trump and his base), chatted with a friendly support representative who allegedly lives somewhere in Missouri, according to the Trump Mobile site.

After confirming my information, the support rep told me that I won’t be able to log in at TrumpMobile.com until the phones actually ship. She said she couldn’t give me an exact date of when that would happen, but said it “could be sometime in October.” I then asked if I would receive any correspondence on this, considering I had only received one email, and she said I would hear from the company “soon” about the status of my order.

Obviously, it’s incredibly sketchy that I can’t log in to my account without having the actual phone. Literally every other phone company in the world provides account access as soon as you give them money. There should be a section for updating my account information, seeing my purchases, canceling my order, etc. The idea that this account management system exists, but I can’t access it, is ridiculous. Of course, it’s possible the reason I can’t log in is that the account system doesn’t exist at all, which wouldn’t surprise me.

So yeah, I have a receipt for handing Trump Mobile $100, but nothing else. If I didn’t call 888-TRUMP45, I wouldn’t even know if my order was still being processed. It’s been a very quiet three months.

But despite things being very quiet in my inbox, there have certainly been plenty of happenings for Trump Mobile since it launched.

On June 16, the inaugural T1 Phone looked as you see it above: a curiously iPhone-like, gold-plated, wonky abomination that was claimed to be made in America. Since then, it has gone through many changes, which is peculiar for a phone that was, ostensibly, produced right here in the USA and ready to pre-order.

First, the T1 Phone went from what you see above to becoming an actual iPhone. This appeared in multiple ads from the brand. Although we can’t say anything definitively, it certainly looks like all the company did was cover an iPhone 16 Pro Max in gold and try to pawn it off as the T1 Phone. Even if that’s not the case, there’s no denying that the phone we saw on June 16 and the phone in the ads aired a few weeks later are not even close to being the same:

Remember how Trump Mobile claimed that the T1 Phone would be made in America? I wrote a whole article about how that is literally impossible for even the largest and richest smartphone companies to do, let alone something as small as Trump Mobile. Well, wouldn’t you know it, but a week after the initial announcement of the T1 Phone, Trump Mobile scrubbed away all the “made in America” mentions on its site, replacing them with kind-of-gross-sounding claims like being made with “American hands behind every device,” or incredibly vague claims like being “designed with American values in mind.” What does that even mean?

The latest development for the T1 Phone is its most impressive yet. Somehow, it went from an iPhone knock-off to an actual iPhone before morphing into a Galaxy S25 Ultra in a Spigen case. This version of the phone appeared in official social media posts from Trump Mobile. The real kicker here is the utter laziness on display, as whoever created the obvious render of the golden Galaxy S25 Ultra forgot to scrub the Spigen logo from the back, which can clearly be seen under the American flag:

Another change that happened worth mentioning is that the coverage map for Trump Mobile’s cellular network originally included the Gulf of Mexico. One of Trump’s more inane actions this term was changing this body of water’s name to the Gulf of America, a change that few countries have actually accepted. To see the “global” name of the Gulf on Trump Mobile’s own site was pretty hilarious. What’s even more hilarious is that rather than take the time to change the name within the map, Trump Mobile just removed all body of water labels from the maps.

Anyway, the bottom line here is that the T1 Phone could be anything at this point. We have no confirmed concept of what the phone looks like, where it’s made, or when it will come out. All I know is that I’m out $100.

As mentioned earlier, the support representative at Trump Mobile with whom I chatted said the T1 Phone should launch sometime soon, possibly in October. While I’m not holding my breath for this to happen, Trump Mobile does need to ship something eventually. Otherwise, it would need to refund every pre-order or risk a class-action lawsuit or even an official investigation for fraud.

I expect that we’ll start seeing phones ship before the end of the year. What I expect to receive, though, is something that doesn’t look anything like any of the phones we’ve seen thus far. I fully expect it to be a cheap, Chinese-made Android phone plated with faux gold. I expect Trump Mobile to spend as little money as possible on procuring the phones and customizing them so that it can keep as much profit as it can from the $499 retail price.

Afterwards, I expect there to be a lot of angry buyers. They’ll hem and haw about the shoddy product and the terrible customer service they’ll inevitably get as they try to pursue refunds. Then, the Trump sons will declare the company bankrupt, liquidate it, and laugh all the way to the bank. Of course, there will be no legal repercussions for this, as the Trump family (and Trump himself) has used this exact methodology many times in the past with everything from vitamins to magazines to steaks, all without any serious legal response. Why would they change up the clearly winning formula?

Of course, I could still be surprised. Maybe this will be the first truly legitimate business venture from the Trump family? Time will tell.