When the Temu Brothers, Eric and Don Jr., unveiled on Monday the new Trump Mobile Wireless Service from the Trump Organization, they said its upcoming T1 phone would be “proudly designed and built in the United States.”
But experts are fact-checking the claims and providing reviews based on the specs, and concluding that there are striking similarities between the T1’s specifications and an already available, Chinese-made phone.
“Unless the Trump family secretly built out a secure, onshore or nearshore (fabrication) operation over years of work without anyone noticing, it’s simply not possible to deliver what they’re promising,” said Todd Weaver, CEO of Purism, one of the only known companies to actually manufacture a cell phone in the United States.
Weaver and a second expert both say the T1 phone looks like a version of the already available Revvl 7 Pro 5G, made by China-based Wingtech, which retails on Amazon for around $169.
The Trumps plan to sell the gold-toned T1 for $499.
Trump Mobile offers a flagship “47 plan” for $47.45 a month, a reference to TFF’s two terms as president. Customers can switch to Trump Mobile by calling 888-Trump45.
Only hours after Trump Mobile launched the new grift, the coverage map was pulled from the website after readers discovered the map listed the bigly body of water off Texas and Florida as the Gulf of Mexico — instead of the Gulf of America.
Gadget reviewers at Gizmodo called Trump Mobile a bad deal and a privacy nightmare.
There are a lot of bad things about the Trump phone. There’s the gaudy, I-hate-poor-people gold aesthetic; the “long life camera” that I assume is supposed to mean “long-life battery” that is actually not long-life at all; and the fact that it’s masquerading as an American-made device, though it clearly is not being made in America and likely never will be. My personal favorite is the fact that it’s 5G enabled, which, as we all know, may not jibe well for a certain subsect of people whose conspiratorial cult (QAnon) thinks 5G caused COVID-19. But all of that could be trivial when you unpack how disastrous a Trump phone (at least in theory) could really be.
What’s to prevent, say, I don’t know, someone who works in government with direct access to that information from collecting and using that data for their own purpose?
The reviewer goes on to state that our devices are already a privacy minefield, but adding politics into the platform is a disaster-in-waiting.
I don’t want to be an alarmist here; Trump’s phone likely won’t end up being a threat to that already-tenuous digital privacy for several reasons. One is that this phone sucks, and I don’t think many people will be tempted to buy it, let alone use it every day or throw their most personal information into it. Secondly, even if this thing did sell, only the most hardcore Trump supporters would be using it, so the privacy pitfalls would only affect Trump’s voting base. Lastly, I have my doubts that this thing is even real. There’s a high chance, if I were a betting man, that Trump’s family never even gets their shit together enough to make this monstrosity a reality, especially if initial attempts to purchase it are any indication.
