Why we’re going to keep talking about the Trump phone
Not everyone thinks I should do it. I was told that covering Trump Mobile “played into his hands,” that “this obvious scam” [doesn’t need] no more advertising” and that “we don’t need to read about it literally every week.” And they’re just nice posts – you don’t want to see some of the others.
Still, I think it’s a good question. For what am I write here week after week on a phone that, as far as we know, doesn’t actually exist? Why didn’t we just write it off as bad and impossible and move on with our lives?
The short answer is: because it’s important.
The long answer is: we can’t move forward because this is still ongoing and still needs to be accounted for. If the T1 Phone 8002 reached buyers and turned out to be a real smartphone, probably a pretty bad one, that would be it. But no one has a phone yet. Nobody even seen the phone again. And Trump Mobile has gone eerily silent, with no updates in months to its website or social media profiles.
This also fits perfectly into The edgethis is the way. Do you want us to stick to phones? That’s it! It’s a phone – at least in name – and we want to know what’s going on with it.
In fact, it sits in the eye of a perfect storm of Edge-ness. It’s a phone, and we’ve got it covered. This is probably vaporware, and we’re always happy to report products that will never exist. This creates a pretty clear regulatory problem for the FCC, and we like to point out opportunities for Brendan Carr to be a model. And yes, it’s a question of politics… The edge covers that. Always has been, and always will be.
But even more, it is something that deserves to be pointed out, and often mentioned. In the Donald Trump administration’s grand scheme, a gold Android phone that won’t actually be made in the United States is just small fries. But it’s emblematic of empty promises and naked scams, baseless assertions that they don’t expect to ever be challenged on. This is an administration that presided over one of the biggest tech industry booms (bubbles?) in decades, had a tech brother as one of its top advisors, and hosted half of Silicon Valley at the inauguration, and it doesn’t know that you can’t build $500 Android flagships in the United States?
Trump Mobile, for the third week in a row, did not respond to a request for comment.
