Does Trump Mobile know how many stripes are on the American flag?

Where is Trump’s phone? We will continue to talk about it every week. We reached out, as usual, to ask where the Trump phone is. This week, despite all our hopes, we still don’t have our phone, but we have new doubts about the company’s patriotic credentials.

It’s been a memorable few days for Trump Mobile, during which it defied haters by announcing that its phones would be shipping to buyers this very week. Not that there’s any indication that the company actually did this, but I digress. Because what I really want to talk about today is the American flag.

I’m not American, which is probably why I didn’t immediately realize that something about the T1 phone’s design was… weird. And no, I’m not talking about the gold finish, the uneven camera lens spacing, or the fact that it looks suspiciously like a two-year-old HTC phone. I mean the American flag which is featured prominently on the back. At first glance, to a non-native, it looks good. But upon closer inspection, there is something curious: it only has 11 stripes. Last time I checked, there really should be 13.

The 13 stripes represent the 13 colonies that broke away from British rule to fight for independence, so you probably shouldn’t cut two of them. What’s even stranger is that Trump Mobile changed its logo to introduce the error. Take a closer look at the near-final version of the phone shown to me in February, with its giant T1 logo (thankfully since removed), and you’ll see that the flag at the bottom has the correct number of stripes. Someone at Trump Mobile changed the logo to stripes out for the final version. Under a president who wants to criminalize flag burning, this comes agonizingly close to the limit of the law.

There is a charitable reading on all this. Look at both versions of the logo and you’ll see that the “Trump Mobile” logo below the flag has moved a fraction of an inch closer, about the same distance as the other stripes from each other. Perhaps this is now the 13th tape, which might seem a bit sacrilegious in its own way. It would be a bit clumsy in design, but at least it’s not a complete blunder.

But that doesn’t explain this week’s glossy promotional video for the phone. While it mostly shows the typical version of the phone, with its 11-band logo, there’s a luxurious slow-motion close-up pan shot that shows… nine bands. Nine!? There’s no way to defend this with a fallacious claim about “clever” logo design, it’s just plain wrong no matter which way you look at it. And it’s downright confusing: why does the logo change on the phone between different shots of the video?

The most obvious theory is of course that of generative AI. Maybe Trump Mobile just fired up a quick prompt from Grok for a “clever marketing video for a gold phone that definitely has the normal number of stripes in the American flag.” That certainly seems possible, because that’s not the only inconsistency: The texture of the phone’s signature gold finish varies throughout, frosty in some shots and perfectly shiny in others. The phone’s start screen also changes, as does its box: I count three different versions of each. Surely only AI could be this inconsistent?

Maybe…and yet, things are never that simple when it comes to Trump Mobile. Because there’s another oddity in this promotional video: a fleeting glimpse of a scratch on the camera module, easy to miss but impossible to ignore. You may have already guessed it, but in the following shots, it is nowhere to be seen. It seems unlikely that AI will introduce a scratch, suggesting that there is was a real phone somewhere in this video – incompetently handled, poorly filmed – but probably mixed in with a sea of ​​AI-generated clips next to it.

Just believe that Trump Mobile really has phones ready to ship after all. So far I haven’t found a single person online credibly claiming to have received a shipping alert, much less a phone call. For our part, we haven’t received any emails letting us know that the two phones we ordered are ready to ship, and logging into our Trump Mobile account gives no obvious sign that the company even has our order. There is a box labeled “T1 Deposit”, but it simply lists the details of a cell plan we haven’t ordered and says “Expiration Date: To Be Assigned”. It’s unclear what exactly is set to expire, beyond my hope of one day getting a phone.

For what seems like the hundredth time, I reached out to Trump Mobile for comment. For what is certainly the first time, I had to ask them if they know how many stripes there are on the American flag.

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