“Not a real phone”: Brutal new exposé reveals the hilarious reality behind Tr*mp Mobile

There’s been plenty of brouhaha surrounding the T1 Tr*mp Mobile phone, both before and after it finally made its in-person debut.

In early May, nearly a year after the Tr*mp family collected $59 million in presales for the T1, the physical rollout was still nowhere to be seen. By the end of the month, seemingly stressed out by all the talk about the T1 still being vaporware a full year later, Tr*mp Mobile finally–finally!–released the first physical phones to consumers and reviewers. And shocker! They were just as terrible as we expected.

The phones worked fine and did their job, but most reviewers clocked the fact that this was a recycled Android model that retails for around $130—far less than the $500 Tr*mp Mobile charges for the gold-plated, not-made-in-the-USA product.

But the worst was yet to come after the phones were subjected to a massive privacy breach scandal… within a week of release.

How about we take this to the next level?

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Since that time, things have been mainly quiet on the Tr*mp Mobile front. Until now. One tech reviewer finally got around to giving his full, unadulterated opinion of the glorified HTC handset.

The Verge’s reviewer spent over a month with the device, and is now sharing his honest thoughts. The verdict? The T1 is a “deeply unserious phone,” as if we didn’t already know.

“It’s just as bad as I thought it would be,” News Editor Dominic Preston explains, “but not in the ways I expected.”

In addition to being a clear “marketing stunt,” which we definitely knew, the phone has a number of annoying, if not straight up irresponsible, details that threaten to leave it barely functioning by the end of a year or two.

“The Tr*mp phone is dated right out of the gate,” Preston says, which seems obvious, but if we recall how quickly the phone suffered a privacy breach after release, a darker picture emerges. Almost every feature has a “gotcha” element. The much bragged-about 50 megapixel cameras aren’t backed up by sensors large enough to produce great imagery. The battery is good, but the charging is slow. The good things about it, Preston says, are the good things about any basic, working Android model.

But for $500, you’d expect your phone to last for more than a year in safe, stable condition. This, Preston predicts, will not be the case for the T1.

The fact that the phone is an “old, cheap” piece of repurposed material means that it might never get any kind of Android update, leading to slow, buggy software and security concerns.

“I don’t trust Tr*mp Mobile to support this phone in any meaningful ongoing way,” Preston says. “There’s a real risk that anyone who buys this phone will have an out-of-date, insecure phone within months, not years.”

Even worse is the fact that the phone’s scammy long game is hidden in plain sight. Last July, when the phone was still vaporware with a projected October release date, customers who called the Tr*mp Mobile service line got connected to… an auto insurance company in Missouri? The current phone also comes with a telehealth app, Doctegrity, preinstalled.

So it would seem that the true grift, as usual, isn’t about the money Tr*mp Mobile makes from selling the phones themselves. It could just be another pay-to-play scheme where companies can advertise their wares through preinstalled apps on Tr*mp phones.

Gotta keep those grifts diversified!

The good news is that, unlike certain of the family’s other grifts, the problems with the T1 really only affect the people who were foolish enough to buy the product in the first place. All we can do at this point is wish them good luck, and say “I told you so” later.

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