Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, some impressive alleged sales figures have gone viral — but they might be too good to be true.
This week, I saw something new in my regular scouring of the web for updates on the Trump phone: a repeated claim that Trump Mobile has secured nearly 600,000 preorders for the phone. With a $100 deposit per device, that would make for a tidy $60 million payday for Trump Mobile already.
It’s curious timing, coming just before yesterday’s open letter to the FTC from Elizabeth Warren and a group of other Democrats, calling on the agency to open an investigation into the company’s alleged “false advertising and deceptive practices.” Not everyone agrees Trump Mobile deserves the Democrats’ attention, in part from the assumption that not that many people are likely to have put money down for the phone in the first place. As one commenter on my story yesterday suggested, “I can’t imagine a lot of folks were dumb enough to fall for this.” But according to these new figures, over half a million people were.
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.
I first saw the figure in, of all places, the Threads feed of California governor Gavin Newsom’s press office, which had shared a screenshot of a tweet of a Grok summary making the claim. Trustworthy, right?
The Grok post cites “reports from sources like Fortune, NPR, and The Guardian” for the 600,000 preorders, but a quick search of their recent output shows no sign of the number. I wanted to know where Grok got it from, if not there.
A quick Google search turns up an awful lot of social media posts, from accounts both big and small, but also a few stories in seemingly legitimate publications. India’s Economic Times and Hindustan Times both reported a more specific figure of 590,000 preorders, referencing an unspecified Associated Press report as the source.
The only recent AP coverage of Trump Mobile was this story from last week, summarizing the repeated delays, which makes no claim to specific preorder figures. I reached out to the organization, and its VP of corporate communications, Lauren Easton, confirmed to me that “AP’s original stories never contained such a number.”
The plot thickens. I tried the authors of the two stories citing AP, and one got back to me. Hindustan Times writer Shamik Banerjee called the citation “a typo,” and told me that the figure was in fact taken from The Times of India.
The Times of India story, which is bylined only to the newspaper’s lifestyle desk, is more transparent in its sourcing: a viral post by a meme account.
Bricktop_NAFO, a seemingly British account with just over 99,000 followers, mostly posts pro-Ukraine content, interspersed with unrelated memes and joke posts. It does a regular line in anti-Trump posts too, and on January 11th, it shared the claim that “590,000 idiots purchased Trumps Mobile phone [sic] that went on sale.”
As far as I can tell, this is the oldest online mention of the 590,000 figure, though the 600,000 number appeared in a Facebook post back in December, albeit one with no likes, no comments, and only a single, private share. Bricktop_NAFO’s post, by contrast, has been viewed 2.8 million times according to X and reposted another 8,000. It’s ground zero for this particular strain of misinformation.
I reached out to Bricktop_NAFO, both in its DMs and in a public reply to the post, to ask if it had a source for the claim, but the account owner didn’t reply in time for publication. I also asked if it could point me toward the $45 Temu phone it claimed was a match — my colleague Allison Johnson previously tried, and failed, to find an exact dupe of the T1 Phone, and as far as I’m aware, no one has successfully matched its spec sheet and design to an existing handset.
The ripple effect from this single tweet has been impressive. X’s own share figures above don’t include the countless other posts that have picked up the made-up number and run with it, even taking it as far as Governor Newsom’s press office. It’s been covered by multiple publications, now presented as fact on MSN.com and tech site Phone Arena. And that coverage has helped it to filter into the chatbots and not just Grok — Gemini and ChatGPT were both happy to confirm to me that 600,000 T1 Phones have been ordered so far, the former falsely attributing the number to the Associated Press, and the latter to Phone Arena.
As for how many Trump Phone preorders have actually been placed? No one outside the company knows, and so far, it’s not telling. I asked the Trump Mobile press office for an actual preorder figure but, believe it or not, I haven’t heard back.
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