By Ben Yi, Grade 10
Trump Mobile was announced on June 16, 2025 by President Donald Trump Jr. and his son, Eric Trump. The flagship product, called the T1, a gold-colored android phone, was marked at $499, bundled along $47.45. The smartphone was heavily marketed as a “made in America”, which quickly became one of the main selling points of the product. That language was quietly removed from official materials shortly after the announcement, replaced with vague phrases like “designed with American values in mind.”
An estimated 590,000 customers paid $100 for the pre-order and since receiving the money, the phone missed implied launch windows in August, September and December 2025, then a projected mid-March 2026 T-Mobile certification deadline.
While some news outlet reporters have received their phones, many of the other hundreds of thousands of people who pre-ordered the product have still not received their phones. The fine print on the Trump Mobile website has indicated that the phones may never actually arrive.
The T1 seems very similar to Escobar phone, a product that many customers, when ordering the phones, reportedly never received them, with only a small handful of tech influencers receiving the actual phone. The company behind the Escobar phone, Escobar Inc, also allegedly sent bogus product orders, consisting of a book, allowing Escobar Inco to claim that they had actually shipped out the phone.
The president using his influence over people to get them to buy a product that may or may not exist that people probably do not need, is not a good look, especially when paired with the fact that some customers reported unauthorized recurring charges on their cards from Trump Mobile.
