The website failed, went to an error page, and then charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70. I received a confirmation email saying I’ll receive a confirmation when my order has been shipped, but I haven’t provided a shipping address or paid the full $499 price tag. It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone.
I look forward to learning more about how terrible these phones turn out.
deleted by creator
Very plausibly what started as a FBI monitoring tool which no longer has any staff with knowledge of the program anymore.
well i’m definitely shocked that the guy banned from operating a charity in new york because he scammed children with cancer would operate a shoddy business.
Unfortunately true. Worth reading that snopes article just to see how much fucked up stuff was actually happening though. It’s not a mischaracterization to say they stole from kids with cancer through self dealing.
With a track record like that, he’s the first person I would trust. /s
Usually he’s not even involved in running the business, they’re licensing deals where some scammer pays a few million up front to use the Trump name, which is then used to scam his followers.
Even as a ‘lets see what this grift is all about’…why the hell would anyone order this horseshit…beyond stupid.
Well hopefully he does a charge back on his card if he’s smart. I wouldn’t give his ass a dime.
Journalism doing things the right way would try this out. You investigate one thing, learn about another, and inform.
To rip it apart on a software and hardware level to find the backdoors and spyware. We need to know how hardcore we are being spied on when the guy near us has one.
Most low cost phone resellers have no idea what software is even running on their phones. They just compile some samples from the manufacturers SDK, slap their own logo on top and ship it.
I’m positively surprised it’s supposed to come out with android 15. Barely one major version behind.
Journalism budget.
This person buying it might convince persuade others to not to buy it.
Youtubers going for content.
Conceptually, it’ll make one f of a collectors item one day there’s no way enough will sell to make them common.
In much the same way the Confederate memorabilia is collectable.
As in, “You should avoid anyone who collects this shit. They’re probably a white nationalist.”
Or you can spray paint your old iPhone with gold coloring, slap a Trump logo on it and sell it on ebay to some unsuspecting MAGA fan for $2,000.
It’s not hard to copy Trump’s signature … you could throw that on the phone and charge $5,000 and tell everyone that you bought it at a MAGA rally where Trump signed it in 2024.
If they can grift … we can all grift harder
Man you’re right. I was eyeing a fairphone anyway…
He did gut any dept of gov that would go after grifters or hold them accountable.
In that case, someone should come out with a quality phone and just slap Trump logos all over the damned thing and charge $2,000 for a $500 phone. Run the business until someone tells you to stop.
Sell Trump crap … it’s all crap anyway … make money on it if people are dumb enough to pay for this shit.
Something tells me that won’t stop someone from getting in trouble for misusing his name. Straight to deportation with you!
Sounds like an easy way out of this hell hole.
As much of a hell hole as this country is and will become, there are other levels to hell that are worse.
Not where I was going for that, more like museum pieces. He’s really done a bunch of shit we absolutely should NOT have allowed. A president, releasing a phone, while in office for a grift. Our great grandkids (hopefully) will be walking through the Smithsonian going what the FUCK was going on in the 20’s, and one of these e-waste POS will be sitting there staring back at them.
IDK about that, the Saudis have like a million units sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
Yeah, I guarantee the people who collect it will also have a sizeable collection of nazi memorabilia too.
And claim they’re just history buffs
“I just find the civil war fascinating.”
Def seems to be a crossover between the two.
For the same reason they put bandages on their ears: they’re fucking morons.
…because the author is an investigative journalist?
We all know it’s a scam, but it’s their job is to prove it. To prove it you have to (attempt to) buy it.
I agree any actual people trying to buy it are morons.
It seems a lot of people have forgotten that proper journalism is more than repeating what someone tweets
Let me guess. It’s a rebranded Chinese phone that typically goes for like 50 bucks?
Yep, apparently it’s a Wingtech REVVL 7 Pro 5G, which goes for $170 under the T-Mobile brand on Amazon.
The Revvl is the cheapest phone T-Mobile offers last time I was in need of a replacement; they basically give it away free if you do 2 year contracts instead of normal month-to-month, contractless services. It’s what my dad uses. 🤣
The first thing that stood out to me is that the T from the phone logo in the thumbnail looks suspiciously similar to the T from T-Mobile. Like, almost identical to my untrained eye.
Not quite, but relatively close.
cosmetically tweaked
It would have to be super tweaked considering the phone you referenced has four cameras, and a notch style front camera.
My bet is that this is a 10 second photoshop job and the actual phone will look nothing like that.
I mean if you do a difference blend of two of the cameras, you get a perfectly black circle (minus some blending at the edges):
.This means that the cameras are exact pixel-perfect copies of each other arranged in that order by photoshop. They don’t exist on any phone.
Yes, I wouldn’t assume the picture has anything to do with the phone (if any) people will actually receive.
And they’ll ironically lose the lawsuit about the lies and deception of this, the defense of which will be funded by donations from the idiots that buy this phone and receive messages every hour asking for more money for the legal defense fund.
But it’s golden and has a convicted felon’s name on it. That should make up for the rest of the value right?
He saw the Escobar phone and thought it was a good plan.
There’s a disposable vape with that name.
The Escobar Phone is a weird name for a vape
Well, of course! How else would it sell in this day and age?
You can even buy a refurb for about $80, which is hilarious lol
It’s like that Trump watch with the T missing. “I was expecting something with the integrity of the President”. Yeah, you got that.
Daily reminder, Jimmy Carter willingly sold his peanut farm because his morality told him of his own viewpoints that it may be seen as unfair for a President to own business interests while serving the most important role of government. Which in his mind may come off as corrupt.
We now have a president who see’s his name as a brand. That’s where we’ve gone.
And it would just be Jimmy’s Peanuts in the end. Nothing more, nothing less. Opposed to this cheap gold platted shit Trump keeps trying to sell…
It’s much worse than that, he’s actively exploiting his position in government for personal gain. They have a gold Trump credit card that advertises that it’s “an official website of the US government”.
Worse than that, he’s hosting $1M a plate dinners for “access” and attendees get things like pardons for their family members or government approval of business deals after paying these bribes.
Land of the free!*
* but only if you’re rich enough
Daily reminder, Jimmy Carter willingly sold his peanut farm because his morality told him of his own viewpoints that it may be seen as unfair for a President to own business interests while serving the most important role of government. Which in his mind may come off as corrupt.
Well, that and he was complying with the Emoluments Clause. You know, that thing that should’ve seen Trump impeached on Inauguration Day – 2017, not even just 2025!
People are forgetting too that this is just a job that he can be fired from. The SCOTUS and Republicans can fire him at any moment, but they aren’t. These middle managers suck.
They’re complicit. You don’t fire a boss because some people don’t like them, you fire a boss when you don’t like them.
What a state of affairs we’re in…
middle managers suck.
FTFY
Who’s going to sit in 15 hours worth of meetings each week if not the middle managers?
and that’s why president carter was the last great and decent president the us has had.
Never ceases to embarrass this nation
This is what a software developer would call a con-action error.
The US is a failed state. There’s no other way to put it.
It’s not for lack of a better term. It’s just accurate.
Failing, not failed. Don’t give up! Things could get a lot worse, we’re nowhere near the bottom. They could also get better.
Pessimist: It’s all terrible.
Optimist: But it might be even more terrible tomorrow!
Imagine if earlier fascists were as corrupt with conflicts of interests. Maybe we could call via the Adolfone.
The MussoliniPad, doesn’t get WiFi at gas stations
The Francoin is doing poorly in the crypto markets.
Weird. Mussolini’s greatest achievement was at a gas station.
Clearly the wrong price; should be going for $86.47.
I don’t get it
86 is a term used in restaurants to tell the staff when a product is no longer available. 47 means the 47th president of the US
Americans say “86 [thing]” to mean “get rid of [thing]”
I’m an American and I rarely if ever hear this
It’s something Americans say.
For those OOTL (like I was):
https://time.com/7285796/james-comey-86-47-trump-threat-investigation-instagram-post-fbi/
That’s an impressive amount of optimism you have there. My guess is, you can kiss that money goodbye, but I hope everything somehow works out anyway.
Of course the phone is gold. Does it come with a stylus shaped like a golf club and diaper as well? Or are those extra?
Edit: Looked the specs. It has a headphone jack and expandable memory. How can Trump get that right and most phone manufacturers can’t?
Because it’s almost certainly an old, low spec device that they’ve bought a job lot of on clearance.
There is hidden significance and symbolism throughout the device for those dedicated trumpies to uncover. For example, one easter egg is that the length of the screen is exactly 4x the length of trump’s dick.
And they prolly didn’t measure it diagonally either. Only straight. As God intended or something.
The post link was a failure, too, being locked behind a paywall and it blocks reader mode. Fuck this entire article.
www.404media.co I Tried Pre-Ordering the Trump Phone. The Page Failed and It Charged My Credit Card the Wrong Amount Joseph Cox 4 - 5 minutes
On Monday the Trump Organization announced its own mobile service plan and the “T1 Phone,” a customized all-gold mobile phone that its creators say will be made in America.
I tried to pre-order the phone and pay the $100 downpayment, hoping to test the phone to see what apps come pre-installed, how secure it really is, and what components it includes when it comes out. The website failed, went to an error page, and then charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70. I received a confirmation email saying I’ll receive a confirmation when my order has been shipped, but I haven’t provided a shipping address or paid the full $499 price tag. It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone.
“Trump Mobile is going to change the game, we’re building on the movement to put America first, and we will deliver the highest levels of quality and service. Our company is based right here in the United States because we know it’s what our customers want and deserve,” Donald Trump Jr., EVP of the Trump Organization, and obviously one of President Trump’s sons, said in a press release announcing Trump Mobile.
The announcement describes the T1 Phone 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.”
💡
Do you know anything else about this phone? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
On the Benny Show podcast Trump Jr. said the phone is for people who want a phone made in America that without the potential of a “backdoor made into the hardware that some of our adversaries may have installed in there.” Trump Jr. also said call centers for Trump Mobile will be in St. Louis, “so we’re keeping our data on shore.”
Various phone companies and projects have pushed the “made in America” aspect of their phones. One is the Liberty Phone from Purism. Building a device in America or ensuring the integrity of a phone’s supply chain can be exceptionally difficult for a smaller company, because many components may be made in China or other countries even if the device itself is assembled in the U.S. And ultimately, a company with no telecom or hardware experience selling a device like the T1 Phone is probably not going to have the expertise to build a more secure device than, say, Apple or Google with its own Pixel devices, which have massive teams updating the hardware and operating system and constantly hunting for threats against their devices and users.
The mobile carrier part of Trump Mobile appears to be a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which is essentially a carrier that piggybacks off the technical infrastructure of the country’s other fully-fledged carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. The Trump Organization’s announcement says that “Trump Mobile will offer 5G service through all three major cellular carriers.”
The Trump family and organization continue to make lucrative deals based on the Trump name while President Trump is in power. Bloomberg found that since Trump’s reelection campaign, the name has powered more than $10 billion of real estate projects, $500 million in sales from one of his crypto ventures, and millions from stakes in other companies.
The Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After maybe pre-ordering my T1 Phone, the confirmation email said I could log into TrumpMobile.com to make changes to my account. I did that, changed my password as prompted, and then hit another error page. I have not been able to log into the site.
About the author
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.
Joseph Cox
