What is the deal with the Trump Mobile T1 Phone?

Here is a roughly complete list of all the things we know for sure about the first phone made for the new Trump Mobile wireless provider: it’s called the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version). It costs $499, and you can reserve one now with a $100 down payment. It is, according to the website, coming in September.

That’s about all I feel confident saying. Beyond that, 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 existence of a “gold version” of the phone implies a not-gold version, but the Trump Mobile website doesn’t say anything more about that.

Here are the salient specs, according to the site:

There’s no processor listed, even though there’s a section for it on the site — and processors are pretty important! Even without that, as far as I can tell, there’s not a single phone currently on the market that matches these specs. (If you find one, tell me about it!) Some of them are fairly standard in the non-premium Android world: you can find phones from Asus and other brands with 6.78-inch screens matching the T1’s description, for instance, and 256GB of storage and a 5,000mAh battery are both relatively common.

The combination of the spec list and the image bears no resemblance to any phone I could find on the market. Ignoring the obviously and poorly Photoshopped picture, though, you can at least begin to get closer to a phone that might be like the T1. The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is probably the best-case scenario: similar screen, same storage and RAM, same battery size, runs Android 15 now. There’s also the Asus ROG Phone 9, which has all those specs and a 50MP main camera. The basic set of internals isn’t hard to come by, really — you can buy a phone with much more impressive ones for hardly any money with just one Alibaba search.

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: Android 15 is generally only available on very recent devices, many cheap phones still don’t support 5G, and almost every phone maker has stopped including headphone jacks with their devices in the last few years. There are a few that have both, but modern phones with a headphone jack are few and far between. And pretty much all made in China.

Frankly, it’s the whole “made in the USA” bit that is the most unlikely thing about the T1. Trump certainly believes that iPhones, as well as other smartphones, could be made in the US, but as Apple CEO Tim Cook and many others have said, there’s virtually no evidence that’s the case. Even smartphone makers based in the US, even the ones making cheaper smartphones, aren’t making their phones in America.

All that aside, though, there are still a thousand things we don’t know about the T1. Starting with, what does it actually look like? Will it be waterproof or durable in any way? Why are the corners of the case so off-color? Why are the three rear cameras so weirdly spaced apart? Why does the top of the phone in the render look more like an iPhone than an Android device? Is it actually going to come with a Trump Mobile background, and will people be able to change it? What kind of heinous bloatware / spyware / crypto scams are going to come built into this thing? If this is the T1 model 8002, what happened to the first 8,001 tries? If it’s coming in September, does that mean Trump is going to try and upstage this year’s iPhone announcement in some way? Why would anyone pay for this thing, just for the privilege of spending too much money on repackaged T-Mobile service?

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.