Earlier this summer, the Trump family proudly announced the debut of a new Trump-branded smartphone — a device they claimed would be “built by Americans, for Americans.” Eric Trump confidently declared that the family intended to “do it better than anybody” when it came to giving patriotic customers a top-tier mobile experience. The company behind the device, Trump Mobile, licenses the Trump name from the Trump Organization and promises that its flagship handset, the T1, will deliver “All-American performance” to its loyal supporters.
All of this would be impressive — if the phone actually existed in consumers’ hands.
According to a new report from NBC News, that day has yet to arrive. NBC journalists who placed orders months ago say they still haven’t received so much as a shipping update. Trump Mobile originally claimed the phone would launch publicly in August. But August came and went. So did September. And October. Now, as Thanksgiving approaches, the T1 remains nowhere to be found.
Trump Mobile’s current messaging now promises a release “later this year.” But with only a sliver of the calendar left, the company will have to move quickly if it expects to make good on that promise.
When NBC reached out to the company’s customer service line, an operator blamed the delay on the government shutdown — an explanation that immediately raised eyebrows, since private companies manufacturing private products are not typically hindered by federal budget negotiations. According to the NBC report, the representative vaguely suggested that deliveries would now begin in “the beginning of December,” offering no exact date and no coherent explanation as to why the shutdown would impact smartphone production.
Gizmodo reporters contacted the same customer support line and received yet another version of the story. This time, the operator claimed that the phone would be released at the end of December, but admitted they had no idea why the device had been delayed for so long.
NBC isn’t the only outlet that has been tracking the mysterious vanishing smartphone.
- In October, USA Today questioned why the T1 still hadn’t materialized.
- The Verge’s Dominic Preston published a sharp critique asking whether the Trump phone even exists at all. Preston wrote: “For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asking — repeatedly — where the promised Trump phone is, whether it exists, and what happened to all the money people have already paid for deposits. And I’m going to keep doing that every week for the foreseeable future.”
This skepticism isn’t coming out of nowhere. Trump Mobile has faced criticism in the past for making vague or shifting claims about the device’s production. The company initially promised that the phones would be manufactured in the United States, but that language quietly disappeared from the website soon after. When asked about this, a Trump Mobile spokesperson insisted to USA Today that the devices were “proudly being made in America” and dismissed doubts as “simply inaccurate.”
Today, the website includes the hazy slogan that “American hands” are “behind every device” — a phrase so vague it raises more questions than answers.
Gizmodo has reached out to both Trump Mobile and the Trump Organization for clarification, but so far, there are no additional details about where the phones are being made, how many have been produced, or whether early buyers will ever receive the product they paid for.
None of this should come as a tremendous surprise. Donald Trump has spent decades putting his name on a vast array of products — hotels, clothing, steaks, bottled water, casino ventures, a university, fragrances, board games, and even frozen hamburgers. A smartphone was bound to appear eventually. And given his long list of business ventures that fizzled, stalled, or collapsed outright, the current uncertainty around Trump Mobile’s flagship device feels almost predictable.
Still, the future is unwritten. For all we know, Trump Mobile might be just weeks away from shipping a phone that the family will hail as the greatest technological achievement of the century.
Meanwhile, Trump family business ventures continue to multiply. According to reporting from PBS, journalist Zeke Faux estimates that the family has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from World Liberty Financial, one of several cryptocurrency ventures they’ve launched since Trump returned to political prominence. Whether the T1 smartphone will join their list of profitable enterprises — or their list of forgotten experiments — remains to be seen.