The Phantom Menace of the Trump Mobile T1 SmartPhone: Silicon Dreams & Supply Chain Realities
The grifting never ends. Nor does the journamalistic sanewashing…
The MADE IN THE USA “T1SM Phone” Trump Mobile smartphone is not about technology and manufacturing. It is about confidence games.
Plus it is about the willingness of an awful lot of people who know better to sanewash Donald Trump and his family, in the interest of helping those confidence games succeed.
It is about profiting from fantasy narrative. It is a case study in the persistent American fantasy of industrial self-sufficiency, a fantasy that collides, again and again, with the realities of comparative advantage and global value chains. The economics are clear: unless one is willing to pay a premium—often a steep one—“Made in America” is, for now, a slogan, not a supply chain. The performance is the point. The T1 understood as a $499 phone made in America that beats Apple’s biggest, priciest iPhone models will never ship. But its myth is already in circulation, and being propagated by people who know better.
The Trump Organization <https://trumpmobile.com/> says:
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW!
Get ready to experience the power of TrumpSM Mobile. Our MADE IN THE USA “T1SM Phone” is available for pre-order now. Reserve your phone TODAY!! The “T1SM Phone” will be available in September 2025…
It has, according to its launch text, a “5000mAh long life camera”. That means that its camera can deliver 5 ampere-hours of current to the phone before it is exhausted. The problem is that cameras on smartphones are described in units of megapixels—1,048,576 picture elements. Batteries are described in units of mAh. Batteries do not have picture elements. Cameras do not have cumulative DC electric current-delivery capacities.
Nobody touching or taking a look at the Trump Mobile phone-offer website <https://trumpmobile.com/t1-phone> before its launch understands a smartphone well enough to be able to distinguish between its battery and its camera.
And I doubt very much that anyone building a phone would offset the fingerprint sensor at the bottom to the right of the center of the screen.
But I would also doubt very much that anyone drawing a mockup image of a phone would offset the fingerprint sensor at the bottom to the right of the center of the screen.
So there are many mysteries here.
Another mystery is the Wall Street Journal <https://www.wsj.com/tech/trump-t1-phone-components-features-2415c7cd> here.
It claims that this MADE IN THE USA “T1SM Phone” “shows some specs that would beat Apple’s biggest, priciest iPhone models”.
It headlines the story “Trump’s Smartphone Can’t Be Made in America for $499 by August”, focusing on the fact that this phone—if it exists at all—is right now being assembled in China. But it’s not just that you cannot make a smartphone in the United States with specifications that beat Apple’s biggest, priciest iPhone models and sell it at $499 this summer. It is that you cannot make a working smartphone with specifications that beat Apple’s biggest, priciest iPhone models anywhere in the world and sell it at this price.
And neither Wilson Rothman nor Ben Raab of the Wall Street Journal (a) knows this and (b) dares to say it.
Ben Raab is an intern. So he is excused.
Wilson Rothman is “deputy Tech & Media editor… [who] manages an award-winning team of columnists and reporters who cover technology in our lives and our businesses…” And Wilson Rothman also appears to lack either knowledge of shame, or both. Yet more evidence that these days there are an awful lot of people working at the Wall Street Journal who do not work for the readers.
Better to get your news from somebody else. For example, from Vox Media’s The Verge, where we find:
David Pierce: The Trump Mobile T1 Phone looks both bad and impossible <https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/687492/trump-mobile-phone-t1>: ‘It’s supposedly made in the US, cheap, and coming this fall. I doubt it all…. All we have is a website that was clearly put together quickly and somewhat sloppily, a promise that the phone is “designed and built in the USA” that I absolutely do not believe, a picture that appears to be nearly 100 percent Photoshopped, and a list of specs that don’t make a lot of sense together….
The… spec list and… image… no resemblance to any phone I could find…. Ignoring the obviously and poorly Photoshopped picture…. Where things get especially strange, though, is its supposed combination of Android 15, 5G, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. In many ways, these are opposing specs….
It seems utterly unfathomable that you could build a phone with this set of specs, at this price, to be delivered in September. Either Trump Mobile has done something truly remarkable here (and I’d bet you a T1 Phone 8002 that it hasn’t), or the phone it ends up shipping will not be the one buyers are expecting. Like we always say here at The Verge, it’s vaporware until it ships. And the Trump Mobile T1 Phone 8002 is as vapor-y as it gets…
Plus:
Allison Johnson: Who is really behind the Trump Mobile T1 phone? <https://www.theverge.com/tech/687800/trump-t1-phone-suspects-revvl-ulefone-doogee>: ‘Our money’s on… the T1… be[ing] a white label device with most or all of its production handled by a Chinese ODM…. These dozen or so companies are responsible for as much as 44 percent of smartphone shipments globally, largely handling budget models while OEMs like Samsung and Huawei focus on producing their own high-end devices.… We’ve narrowed it down to a handful of devices…. Was this all a silly waste of time because this phone does not and will never exist at all? Who can say?… DOOGEE Note 58…. Ulefone Note 18 Ultra…. Revvl 7…. Blu G84…
Which points us to what looks like a very good guess:
Max Weinbach <https://x.com/MaxWinebach/status/1934632952366764447>: ‘And the answer is… Wingtech REVVL 7 Pro 5G! Same device as the T-Mobile REVVL 7 Pro 5G, custom body. Wingtech, now owned by Luxshare, makes it in Jiaxing, Wuxi, or Kunming China…