from the grift-upon-grift dept

Mon, Jan 26th 2026 05:32am - Karl Bode

Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a “phone company” is generous; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy grift targeting MAGA rubes.

The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to be a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone that the Trump org claimed would be “proudly designed and built in the United States” and released sometime last August. Not only was the device never going to be made in the States (all mention of that was quickly stripped from press materials), the August launch date came and went with no Trump phone.

We’re well into 2026 and not only is there still no phone (despite folks plunking down $100 pre-orders), pre-order numbers making the rounds appear to be made up.

The Verge has been doing an amusing job relentlessly tracking this story, and found that claims that the Trump Org had sold 600,000 of the nonexistent devices were completely made up, belched around the internet in a game of lazy telephone that even included California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office:

“There’s just one problem: I can’t find a shred of evidence that this figure is true. In fact, it seems to trace back to a single viral, anonymous X post and is a microcosm of how the modern media landscape and AI chatbots can combine to give falsities the sheen of respectability.”

Very Trumpian.

The phone, had it actually become available, appears to just be a sloppy reskin of a much cheaper sub-$200 phone produced in China; ironic coming from the MAGA folks who’ve spent the last decade whining about the national security threats posed by Chinese companies like Huawei, DJI, and TikTok.

The delays are also quite likely caused by either rank incompetence or the pointless tariffs, which they obviously can’t admit. So the Trump Org has instead been lying and claiming the delays are due to the government shutdown, despite the phone having absolutely nothing to do with the U.S. government (outside of the president’s lazy attempt to continually make money off of it).

Meanwhile Democrats are pointlessly urging the Trump FTC to investigate the fake phone company over its fake phones, which Democrats already know can’t happen because Trump illegally fired all Democratic FTC Commissioners and the remaining officials are hopelessly captured by our mad idiot king (something the NBC News coverage of this didn’t think was worth mentioning).

Anyway, great stuff, no notes, very serious country.

Filed Under: fraud, ftc, grifters, mvno, scams, telecom, trump phone, wireless
Companies: patriot mobile, trump mobile