Trump Mobile’s origins lie with a Mexican middleweight boxer

Where is Trump’s phone? We will continue to talk about it every week. Last week we spoke with company executives for the first time, and this week we’re back with more details on how it all started.

Trump Mobile may be named after the US president, but he didn’t come up with the idea, and neither did Trump. In fact, it was MVNO Liberty Mobile executives who approached the Trumps with a pitch for the company, and this wasn’t their first rodeo; five years earlier, Liberty Mobile tested the same playbook with world boxing champion Canelo Álvarez.

That’s what Don Hendrickson and Eric Thomas, the two Trump Mobile executives I spoke with last week, said when they gave me a first look at what they said was a near-final version of the T1 phone. Or, as Hendrickson repeatedly said, when they decided to “open the kimono” to me and reveal more about how the company worked.

Hendrickson previously claimed to have the initial idea for Trump Mobile. Speaking to me last week, he didn’t take full credit for it, but said the idea grew out of conversations with the marketing team at Liberty Mobile — the MVNO owned by Hendrickson, Thomas and Pat O’Brien, another Trump Mobile executive. However, it was Hendrickson who successfully presented the idea to the Trump Organization.

“I got on a plane. I went to Florida,” he told me. “I met with Eric Trump and his team and basically said, ‘Here’s what we’d like to do. Here’s what we think we can do and here’s how we think we can help the American people.'”

What I didn’t realize until talking to Hendrickson was that they had already tried this. Only this time it was with boxer Canelo Álvarez. “We had a Canelo Mobile program with him and he was going to serve Mexican Americans here in the United States, and we were looking at doing something along those lines,” Hendrickson said.

Canelo Mobile launched in May 2020 with familiar promises: expanded cellular coverage, perks like free international calls and roadside assistance (from Drive America, the same service included in the Trump plan), and affordable Android phones, all bolstered by the presence of a famous name.

Canelo Mobile launched with two phones, dubbed The Legend and The Champ, and eventually added a third, The Contender. He made little effort to hide what they really were: handsets made by Hotpepper, a budget brand that supplied devices to budget MVNOs, including Visible and Metro, as well as the federal free phone program Lifeline. There’s not even a Canelo logo on the hardware, but Hotpepper’s distinctive chili logo is in place. I contacted Hotpepper for comment, but the support email on its website bounced.

Canelo Mobile has done a better job of branding its accessories. He sold at least two separate pairs of over-ear headphones bearing Álvarez’s lettering and repeatedly sold different phone sets advertising branded Bluetooth speakers, earbuds, baseball caps, key fobs, and more.

The phones were really differentiated by their software, which supposedly included a selection of pre-installed Canelo apps. These include money sending app Broxel, still one of the boxer’s sponsors, as well as Álvarez’s I Can workout app, which was marketed by an Instagram account last November but no longer appears to be available for download for Android or iOS. They were joined by CaneloRx, a platform for buying prescription drugs at a discount, a move that Trump himself repeats.

Much like Trump Mobile, every element of Canelo Mobile’s cellular service was powered by Liberty Mobile — Hendrickson tells me that Liberty is “umbilically connected” to Trump Mobile, although that connection is slightly opaque to potential customers. For Canelo Mobile, the connection was more explicit, with Liberty co-branding the service alongside Álvarez himself.

Anyone trying to predict the future of Trump Mobile may be curious about how long Canelo Mobile lasted. After launching in 2020, there were no posts on its Instagram or Facebook pages after July 2022. Its website remained alive for a few more years, but Wayback Machine archives suggest its images and formatting started breaking in February 2025, and now the website is entirely offline, with the domain canelomobile.com up for auction. There is no mention of “Canelo Mobile” on the boxer’s current website. I reached out to Álvarez’s publicist for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

It’s hard to say whether Canelo Mobile was a success – his social media profiles each have only a few thousand followers and he never attracted much media attention – but it’s likely that he made enough money for Liberty Mobile to warrant a second attempt.

The biggest difference between the two companies is that Trump Mobile has placed much more emphasis on the idea of ​​making its own hardware, which Hendrickson calls a way to “differentiate” yourself from the competition. “There has never been an MVNO or carrier that has built its own phone,” Hendrickson told me. Other carriers offer branded hardware, of course — T-Mobile has had its own Revvl phones for years — but they’re built under contract by white-label manufacturers. Trump Mobile, with its “final assembly” in Miami, claims to be more directly involved.

It’s hard to square that with Hendrickson’s insistence that the company is first and foremost an MVNO, however. When he talks about the company’s future, he’s much more likely to talk about adding new phone plans and expanding MVNO internationally than building new handsets. Hendrickson calls the T1 phone “this little thing we wanted to do,” while Thomas says the company’s goal “is to attract subscribers…the phone is a tool that helps with that.”

“We’re in the razor blade business, we’re not in the razor business,” Hendrickson says, noting that Trump Mobile’s business is selling mobile plans. It’s to the customers’ advantage, or so the argument goes: because the phone isn’t the company’s “profit center,” Hendrickson says it can be sold at “a much lower margin,” resulting in a more affordable product. I’m not convinced about the Trump phone East such good value for money – its updated spec sheet mostly matches other Android midrangers, many of which are cheaper, and may fall short of them based on details like wireless charging or water resistance. The company’s refurbished Apple and Samsung phones are also clearly bad deals.

Then again, the question of worth is part of why Hendrickson, Thomas, and O’Brien went from boxer to reality TV star turned president in the first place. Canelo Mobile was cheaper than Trump Mobile, even accounting for inflation. Plans were advertised starting at $15 per month, with phones starting at $199.99. In contrast, Trump Mobile’s only available plan is $47.45 per month, and the T1 phone is currently listed at $499, but is expected to increase in price after its eventual launch, potentially nearly double that. Trump, they explain, is a premium brand.

“You think of Trump and I immediately think of quality. I think of a next-level brand,” Hendrickson says. “For us, it’s about honoring that brand, honoring that legacy of quality and integrity.”

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