This is the Trump Phone
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 time, surprisingly, we received a response – and an interview.
The Trump phone is real – maybe, sort of, soon? – and I saw it. Not in the flesh, but in an hour-long video call with two Trump Mobile executives who showed me a phone and explained why it was delayed, when it might actually reach buyers, and why its spec sheet changed again and again.
I spoke to Don Hendrickson – yes, the one who apparently ghosted me last time – and Eric Thomas, two of the three executives who run Trump Mobile. The T1 phone Thomas shows me on Google Meet isn’t a final production model, but apparently it’s close. The T1 The logo – seen since early renders of the phone – will apparently be removed before launch, although the American flag at the bottom will remain, as will the iconic gold finish.
It’s clear from just a glance that this isn’t the same phone the company announced eight months ago. The camera triangle, similar to that of the iPhone, has been replaced by three lenses arranged vertically in a black oval island with the inscription “Trump Mobile” next to it. Look closer and you’ll see that these lenses are unevenly spaced.
The phone is different in many ways from the version announced in June 2025 and the modified spec sheet that appeared on the Trump Mobile website a few weeks later. It looks bigger, with the “waterfall” display (curved screens are back, baby) appearing closer to the originally promised 6.78-inch screen than the 6.25-inch model that appeared a little later.
It will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7-series chipset, typically used in high-end devices, and will include a 5,000mAh battery, 512GB of storage, and supports microSD cards up to 1TB. I don’t know the full camera specs yet, but I’ve been told that the selfie camera and main rear camera use 50-megapixel sensors, and a preview of the user interface of the camera suggests the inclusion of an ultra-wide lens and perhaps a telephoto lens, neither of which had been previously listed.
“This phone is comparable to the high-end phones on the market this year,” Thomas says, later saying it will be comparable to “any phone costing over $1,000.” I’m not entirely sure that’s true, given that you can find comparable specs, even the 50-megapixel selfie camera, in the OnePlus Nord 5, which comes with 512GB of storage in the UK for £499, or around $679. A lot will depend on the performance of the camera and whether it includes headline touches like waterproofing or wireless charging, which I don’t know about yet. But it’s true that some specs – selfie camera resolution, storage capacity, ultra-wide lens – are improved over the T1 phone we saw (or didn’t see) at launch.
To reflect this supposed improvement in quality, a price increase is coming. Hendrickson is quick to point out that everyone who has ever made a $100 deposit (he wouldn’t tell me how many have done so) will still pay a total of $499, but they now call that an “introductory price.” Subsequent buyers will pay more, although “less than $1,000” is all the pair would confirm, with the final price apparently still to be decided.
So why all these changes? According to Thomas and Hendrickson, there was so much interest in the T1 phone that it seemed only right to improve the phone by moving forward a little in their long-term plans. “Let’s leave behind our first entry-level phone that we were going to introduce and be quick to market,” Thomas says of the company’s thinking following the early media attention. “Let’s take our time and do what we had planned as the next step.”
Both men suggest that the decision to redefine the phone’s specifications is to blame for some, but not all, of its delays: The T1 phone is now six months late for launch. Yet they say it will happen soon. The phone has apparently achieved FCC certification (itself supposedly slowed by the government shutdown) and is now awaiting certification with T-Mobile, which is expected to be completed by mid-March. After that, Thomas says the company will be ready to ship phones to early buyers, although he’s hesitant to commit to an exact date. For a phone initially promised for August or September, then by the end of 2025, and always only says “later this year” on the official website, I’d take any launch timeline with a handful of salt.
Either way, it looks like we’ll be seeing more soon. The two executives promise that a “relaunch” of Trump Mobile is imminent and that in “the coming weeks” the website will be updated with images of the final phone, as well as its technical sheet. Our long wait is almost over.
Of course, there’s one thing the T1 phone won’t be: made in the USA. Instead, the handsets go through “final assembly” in Miami, although Thomas is careful not to reveal too much about what that means. It’s a lot more than just “putting a case on the phone” and apparently involves assembling the final dozen or so parts. The two men won’t say where most of the phone was assembled before this, only that it was done in a “favored nation,” which essentially seems to be a way of saying “not China.”
To call a product “made in the USA,” you must meet certain standards, established and enforced by the FTC. The Trump Mobile site currently promises that there are “American hands behind every device,” and Thomas says the wording was chosen because they “want to be upfront and not mislead people at all.” He admits that there “could have been something mistakenly put on the website” at launch (in this case, a huge homepage banner saying the T1 was “MADE IN THE USA” and a press release saying it was “proudly designed and built in the USA”), but that since then “we’ve kind of stayed away from that.”
Full assembly in the US is still what the pair call a “goal”, which they’re apparently working on for future phones like the T1 Ultra – yes, that’s apparently real too, although they won’t tell me much more about it.
I guess we’ll just have to keep waiting, but until then: The Trump phone is real(ish), I’ve seen it (sort of), and it’s finally going to launch next month (maybe).
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